
Class -S._S_2^L 
Book _. JP ^ 6 



CXIQCRIGHT DEPOSZC 



SILVER FIELDS 

AND OTHER SKETCHES OF 
A FARMER-SPORTSMAN 



SILVER FIELDS 

AND OTHER SKETCHES OF 
A FARMER-SPORTSMAN 



BY 

ROWLAND E. ROBINSON 

i ■ 

Author oj " Uncle Lisha's Shop," " Danvis Folks" 
** In New England Fields and Woods," etc. 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
1921 



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COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY MARY R. PERKINS 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



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CONTENTS 

Silver Fields 3 

Fox-HuNTiNG IN New England 17 

Danvis Farm Life 42 

sobapsqua 89 

Black-Bass-Fishing in Sungahneetuk 105 

On a Glass Roof 124 

Merino Sheep 141 

A Little Beaver 158 

Trapping up Little Otter 165 

The Boy 182 

i. take the boy 182 

ii. the boy and the gun 184 

m. the boy and the angle 186 

The Country Doctor 191 

Portraits in Ink 195 

i. the farmer 195 

ii. the trapper 198 

ni. THE SHOEMAKER 201 

iv. the anticipator 203 

v. a professor of fishing 206 

Small Shot 209 

I. SOME POOR men's RICHES 209 

ii. the old gun 212 

iii. the sorrows of sportsmen 214 

iv. the goose-killers 217 

v. why not wait.? 220 

New England Fences 222 

Hunting the Honey-Bee 243 

The Voices of the Seasons 256 



SILVER FIELDS 

AND OTHER SKETCHES OF 
A FARMER-SPORTSMAN 



SILVER FIELDS 

After many downfalls of snow by night and day, 
everything of lesser height and sheer uprightness 
than buildings and trees is buried in universal 
whiteness. Sometimes the snow flutters down 
and silently alights like immense flocks of birds. 
At other times it descends as silently, but like 
the continuous falling of a gray veil shutting one 
in from all the world lying farther away than his 
nearest outbuildings. Another snowfall comes 
blown by howling winds in long slants to the earth 
and whirled and tossed along the fields blurring 
their surface in a frozen crust. 

Then comes a day when the wind quits buffet- 
ing the snow from this side and that and stands 
still, debating which way it shall blow next, while 
the sun burns into the cold blue sky's eastern rim, 
runs its short course over the dazzling northern 
fields, and burns its way out behind the glorified 
western mountains. When the sun is highest the 
air bites cheeks and nose and fingers with a sharp 
chill, and one feels its teeth gnawing his toes 
through his boots if he does not bestir them. At 
nightfall the smoke of the chimneys leans toward 
the North Star and by the next morning the wind 
comes roaring up from the south, armed with 



4 SILVER FIELDS 

swords and spears of cold that no armor of wool 
or fur can ward off, and from every vantage- 
ground of ridge and drift stream the white ban- 
ners of snow. Then clouds come drifting across 
the sky, first a few, then so many that they get 
into a jam against some star or mountain some- 
where to the northward, and in a few hours all the 
blue is clogged with a dull gray mass. As the later 
coming legions of the wind arrive, the temper of 
their weapons is softened and their keen edge 
blunted. The snow loses its crispness and takes 
the imprint of a foot like wax. 

We have a midwinter thaw, the traditional 
January thaw a little belated; and presently it 
begins to rain pellets of lead out of the leaden sky, 
rain that has none of the pleasant sounds of sum- 
mer showers. There is no merry patter on the 
snow-covered roof, no lively clatter on intercept- 
ing green leaves nor splashes of dimpled pools; 
only windows and weather-boards resound to its 
sullen beat. When, after some hours of rainfall, 
the snow has become softened down to the earth, 
so that when one walks in it his tracks show a 
gray, compacted slush at the bottom, the wind 
lulls and veers to the northward and patches of 
blue are opened in the world's low, opaque roof, 
windows through which the sun shines upon some 
fields and mountain peaks, making them whiter 
than the whiteness of snow. 



SILVER FIELDS 5 

The air grows colder, coming out of the north; 
but if the advance of Boreas is slow and cautious, 
and he sends before him his light-armed skir- 
mishers, the snow is frozen so gradually that it 
turns to a crumbly, loose mass, with a thin, 
treacherous surface, where nothing much heavier 
than a fox, if not as broadly shod as with snow- 
shoes, may go without vexatious iand most tire- 
some labor. If the change of temperature is sharp 
and sudden enough to freeze the water held in the 
snow before it has time to leach down to the earth, 
we are given a crust so firm that it is a delight to 
coasters and all walkers and runners on the snow. 

It is now no toil but a pleasure to go across lotSi. 
"The longest way round" is not now "the short- 
est way home." The fields give better footing 
than the highways. The side of the highways is 
pleasanter to the feet than the two grooves the 
horses and sleighs have worn in its center in all 
their two months' going and coming. There is a 
silver stile along every rod of every fence, and you 
may walk anywhere over the buried gray wall or 
rail fence at your ordinary pace, and sit down to 
rest on the top of the stakes where last July, when 
the daisies were blowing, the bobolink sang, 
higher than you could reach. Can it be that sum- 
mer ever blossomed here in these frozen fields? 
How long ago it seems; and yet we are not much 
older ! 



6 SILVER FIELDS 

When the full moon comes pulsing up behind 
the evergreen-crested hill, with the black sil- 
houette of a pine slowly sliding down its yellow 
disk, trunk, dry limb, and bristling branch clear- 
cut against it, and slowly draws toward it the 
long blue shadows, it is no time to bide within 
doors. In every cold night of the year that gives 
many such to us Northern folk we may have fire- 
side and lamplight at some price, but not for love 
nor money many times in a winter such a night 
as this, such warmth out of snow and frost, such 
celestial light shed on silver-paved fields. Let 
us set our faces toward the moon and trail our 
shadows behind us till we lose them among the 
shadows of the pines and hemlocks of Shellhouse 
Mountain. 

Solid and appetizing food is this firm crust for 
our feet! How they devour the way with crunch- 
ing bites, reminding our teeth of the loaf sugar of 
youthful days when the snowy cones, swathed in 
the purple paper that our mothers used for the 
concoction of dyestuff , tempted us to theft. What 
better wine than this still, sharp air! 

The even, smooth surface of the snow has been 
preserved; it is not pitted, nor in places cut into 
fleecy texture as the sun and wind of March carves 
it sometimes. The dark blue shadows of the tree- 
trunks lie clear-edged upon it, not jagged and 
toothed as when they fall on grass ground. Every 



SILVER FIELDS 7 

branch's shadow lies blue-veined upon it, every 
mesh of twigs is netted more distinctly there than 
the substance is against the sky, the torn bird's 
nest and every wind-forgotten leaf are revealed 
on the white surface. 

A winged phantom startles us gliding across the 
silver field just before us, as swift in its flight but 
not more noiseless than the great owl it attends. 
Owl and shadow dissolve in the distant blue and 
white, and presently, when this spirit of the night 
has regained his woodland haunt, his hollow, 
storm-foreboding hoot is heard resounding through 
the dark aisles of the forest. 

All sounds are at one with the hour and season. 
The snow crust cracks in long but almost imper- 
ceptible fissures, the ice settles to the galling level 
of the brooks and ponds with a sudden resonant 
crash, the frozen trees snap like the ineffectual 
primers of an ambushed foe. All are winter's 
voices, as ancient as hoary winter's self, that only 
emphasize the silence out of which they break. 
The jingle of the sleigh-bells along a distant road, 
the crunching of our footsteps, and their sharp 
short echoes, are the only sounds that betoken 
any human presence in all the wide glittering ex- 
panse, with its blotches of woodland and dots of 
sleeping farmsteads. 

We are not the first explorers here. A fox has 
left the record of his wanderings, exaggerated like 



8 SILVER FIELDS 

many another traveler's accounts of himself writ 
on a more enduring page than this, for if you will 
believe this fellow's tracks made before the thaw, 
he was as big as a wolf, and formidable enough to 
raise a hue and cry in the township against him. 
The hare might be frightened to see the print of 
his own pads, now grown as big as the tracks of his 
enemy, the lynx. A skunk was warmed up into 
such activity as his short legs could compass and 
made his mark in the soft snow, unmistakable, 
though almost big enough for the track of the 
mephitic monster of the Wabanakee legend; the 
rows of four footmarks printed diagonally athwart 
his course when he cantered abroad from his bur- 
row are none but his, whereto is added proof of 
his sometime presence in a spicy waft of the air. 
The regular parallel dots of the weasel's track 
make a great show where he came to the surface 
above his regular runway along the buried fence. 
He and the fox, though unseen, are as wide awake 
this cold night as ever, but they and all later 
travelers are modest now, and set down naught 
of their journeys. 

Can it be that there were giants here so lately 
as a month ago when the woodchopper went this 
way to his work! Here are his monstrous foot- 
prints, albeit the stride is short, and there he set 
his huge axe, before which the trees should have 
gone down hke mullein stalks, and there he set 



SILVER FIELDS 9 

his caldron of a dinner pail while he lighted his 
pipe. How could so small a blaze as that little 
burned-out match afforded, ever have fired his 
furnace of a pipe! Yet from these dropped frag- 
ments of home-grown tobacco, I conclude that 
our giant was only an ordinary little Frenchman 
whose feet caught the trick of his tongue. 

The packed snow resisted the thaw more than 
that which lay as it fell, so that beaten paths that 
were sunk below the surface are raised causeways 
now, a narrow, slippery footing that no one tries 
with all this wide pavement to choose from. 

Now if we might have the luck to see a fox, how 
well his furry form, clad for such weather, so agile, 
noiseless, and wild, would fit the scene, and we 
ought to see one, for this little basin, rimmed with 
the rough hills on the east side and on the others 
with low ridges, is a favorite spot with foxes, a 
trysting-place at this love-making season and a 
hunting-ground in spring, summer, and fall, when 
the tall wild grass harbors many field mice. More- 
over, Reynard often gets a free lunch here, for 
hardly a year goes by that, to save the trouble of 
burial, a dead horse or cow is not hauled to this out- 
of-the-way spot where foxes, skunks, and crows 
find cheap and speedy sepulture for everything 
but the bones. It was undoubtedly the bed of a 
little pond two or three hundred years ago and the 
home of beavers or in some such way, of account 



10 SILVER FIELDS 

to the Indians, for on the southwest bank are to 
be found plenty of flint chips of the old arrow- 
makers. Only a little brook trickles through it 
now, complaining with a faint, muffled whimper 
under its concave glare of shell ice, of its dimin- 
ished strength and babbling in a feeble voice of 
the days when it brawled bravely over the stones 
into the pond all the droughtiest summer through 
and tumbled down the rocks below it with in- 
cessant clatter. 

Hush! i Stand stock still, breathe softly and 
whisper no louder, for there, just out of the shad- 
ows of the hill, sits a fox bolt upright and alert. 
A stump? Nonsense! No wood nor stone un- 
touched by the hand of the most cunning carver 
ever had such lifelike form, such expression of 
alertness. You can see, if your eyes are sharp 
enough, the slight motion of his ears as he pricks 
them toward us, as his nose points, for he has 
seen or heard, not smelled, us; for the light breeze 
sets from him to us, and, I fancy, touches our 
nostrils with a faint waft of his pungent odor. 
You can see the curve of his back, his fluffy brush 
lying along the snow — nearly make out the white 
tip of it. The ruddiness of his coat almost shows, 
but moonlight is a poor revealer of color; the pines 
are not green, as we know they are, but black, and 
everything is black or blue, or gray or white. 
Now he moves his head a little. He is growing 



SILVER FIELDS 11 

more and more suspicious and presently will van- 
ish like a swift shadow in the shadow of the woods. 
Shall we send him off with a shout or try how near 
he will let us come? Then step carefully and 
slowly. How steadfast he stands, though we have 
lessened by half the distance that lay between 
us when we first saw him. He must have an ap- 
pointment here with the most bewitching vixen 
in all fox society, and will not budge till he must. 
How does the wise scamp know that our guns are 
at home? Or has he not heard or seen us yet, all 
his looking and listening being for the coming of 
his mistress? Has love made him blind and deaf 
to all enemies but the maiden of his heart? Try 
with a mouse squeak if he cannot be moved by 
an appeal to his stomach. Stock still yet! Con- 
found his impudence or his unvulpine stupidity. 
Salute him with a yell that shall make the moon- 
lit night more hideous to him than the glare of 
noon with a hundred hounds baying behind him. 
The shadowy hill and the black pines behind us 
toss back and forth the echoes of such an infernal 
uproar as has not stirred them since Indians and 
the "Indian devil" were here. Our fox is para- 
lyzed with fright, actually frozen with fear. Let 
us rush upon him and secure him before the blood 
starts again in his veins. Well, it is a stump after 
all ! But were ever mortals played a worse trick by 
a real fox? 



12 SILVER FIELDS 

It is something out of common experience to 
go into the woods in the night-time without 
stumbling over roots, logs, or bushes and groping 
in constant fear of bringing up against a tree. No 
danger now of bumping against trees that show 
as plainly as in a summer day. The undergrowth 
is bent down and snugly packed under the hard 
crust, and brush heaps are bridged with it, and 
trunks of fallen trees are faintly marked by slight 
ridges that one walks over almost without know- 
ing it. The partridge could not find his drum- 
ming-log now if he wanted it, as he will not for 
six weeks to come. Sad is his fate if he was caught 
napping under the snow when this crust made, 
but that, I think, seldom happens to him, though 
often to the poor quail in this region of deep snows. 
Sixty years ago quail were not uncommon here 
where now a wild turkey would scarcely be a 
stranger sight. Such crusts as these have been their 
more relentless enemy than guns and snares or 
beasts and birds of prey, and have exterminated 
them. 

The partridge does not harbor under the snow 
except in cold, dry weather, though he allows him- 
self to be covered by snowfalls. One may often 
see the mould of his plump body where he has 
lain for hours in his snug bed of down, and rarely 
— twice, or thrice in a lifetime, perhaps — one 
may have the luck to be startled by his sudden 



SILVER FIELDS 13 

apparition, bursting from the unsuspected, even 
whiteness of the wood's soft carpet. In mild win- 
ter weather he is aloft where his food is or is em- 
broidering the yielding snow with his pretty foot- 
prints. Here is some of his work done a week agOj 
now frayed out at the edges by the thaw, but it 
has the mark of his own pattern, unmistakable, 
even in this moonlight, very different from the 
clumsy track of civilized poultry. It runs this way 
and that, sometimes doubling on itself, and dis- 
appears in the pallid gloom of an evergreen thicket, 
where perhaps is his roosting-place. 

The floor of the woods is barred and netted with 
an intricate maze of blue shadows, here and there 
splashed with a great blot of shade where the 
branches of a hemlock intercept the moonlight. 

How still it is ! Even the harps of the pines are 
silent, and our ears are hungry for some other 
sound than our own breathing and the crunch of 
our footsteps. Imagine them suddenly filled with 
the scream of a panther, stealthily creeping on 
our track unsuspected, unseen, unheard, till he 
splits the silence with his devilish yell. But they 
tell us now that the panther is voiceless, and the 
tales that thrilled our childhood with an ecstasy 
of delightful terror, of our grandfathers being led 
into the woods by the catamount's cry, like that 
of a woman in distress, were myths — our good 
old grandfathers were liars or they were fools. 



14 SILVER FIELDS 

"brought up in the woods to be scared by owls.'* 
But the panther may be here, for there are pan- 
thers in Vermont yet, or at least there was one, 
two or three years ago, when on a Thanksgiving 
Day two little Green Mountain boys, partridge- 
hunting in Barnard, came upon a monster crouch- 
ing in a thicket of black growth, and a doughty 
grown-up Green Mountain boy killed him at short 
range with a well-delivered charge of BB shot. 
When I was a boy there was always a panther 
prowling about this mountain in huckleberry- 
time, guarding the berries for the two or three 
old berry-pickers who used to tell us of hearing 
his fearful cries. He performed his duty well, as 
far as concerned us youngsters. When the berry 
season was over he departed and was heard no 
more till next summer. 

A sheer wall of rock bars our further way up the 
mountain in this direction. An ice cascade, silent 
as all its surroundings, not the trickle of the small- 
est rill of snow water to be heard in its core, veils 
a portion of the black steep with dull silver, bur- 
nished here and there with a moon-glint. 

Let us sound a retreat and set our faces toward 
the gray steeps of Split Rock Mount and the piled- 
up blue and white Adirondacks, and get back on 
the silver fields, brighter than ever now. As we 
march abreast of our northward slanting shadows, 
with the moon now well up above the world, we 



SILVER FIELDS 15 

fancy that a part of this northern half of the earth 
outshines her. 

Silver fields is not a good enough name to- 
night for these shining farms, for the creek un- 
marked now but by the fringe of wooded banks, 
nor for the broad lake quiet under ice and snow, 
but never when tossed by autumnal storms so 
white as now and scarcely brighter when in the 
glare of the summer sun. If you have a newly 
minted silver coin in your pocket, cast it before 
you and see how dull a dot it is on the surface. It 
would hearten a greenbacker to see how poor a 
show the precious metal makes to look at, hardly 
worth picking up out of acres of brighter riches 
that rust doth not corrupt and that shall be stolen 
by no meaner thief than the sun, the south wind, 
and the rain. The roofs of gray old homesteads 
outshine the lights in the windows, and we won- 
der if any of the inmates are aware how royally 
their houses are tiled. Doubtless not one of them 
thinks of it, or, if at all, only as protecting the pine 
shingles from the sparks of the rousing winter fires, 
or as so much filling for the cistern when the next 
thaw comes ; nor, as compared with it, do the 
interiors, the low, whitewashed ceilings, rag car- 
pets, creaking splint-bottomed chairs and deal 
furniture, seem mean to them or unfitting their 
fine, perishable covering. For ourselves, we begin 
to entertain more kindly thoughts of such indoor 



16 SILVER FIELDS 

homeliness and desire the comforts of its harboring, 
and presently shut ourselves in from the blue sky 
and shining moonlit outer world, tired and con- 
tent to smoke a restful pipe by the fireside. 



FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 

In New England and some of the Northern and 
Middle States, the fox is hunted with two or three 
hounds, or oftener with only one, the hunter go- 
ing on foot and armed with a shot-gun or rifle, 
his method being to shoot the fox as it runs before 
the hounds. The sport is exciting, invigorating, 
and manly, and by its votaries is esteemed the 
chief of field sports. The fox is proverbially the 
most cunning of beasts, often eluding by his 
tricks the most expert hunter and the truest 
hounds. Long walks are required, which take one 
over many miles of woods, hills, and fields; and this 
in fall and winter when the air is always pure 
and bracing. I have noticed that many who de- 
light to shoot the hare or the deer before the 
hounds, are accustomed to scoff at this sport, 
which indeed is generally held in contempt by 
those who arrogate to themselves the title of "true 
sportsmen." 

It is difficult to see wherein it is more unsports- 
manlike to hunt before hounds an animal of such 
self-possession and such varied cunning, that it 
is continually putting its pursuers at fault, when 
it is sportsmanlike to hunt in like manner animals 
who have each, speed failing, only a trick apiece 



18 FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND . 

— the hare depending on its doublings to elude 
the dogs, the deer on running to water. 

The reason for this nice distinction lies, per- 
haps, in that deference to English usage which 
still exists among us. In this case it is most sense- 
less, for even if fox-hunting in English fashion were 
practicable here, it would not be tolerated by our 
farmers, who would never endure the trampling of 
their cultivated fields and the destruction of the 
fences by a score or more hard-riding horsemen. 
But it is not practicable, for no horse could pos- 
sibly follow the course of the hounds and fox 
among our hills and mountains, where the chase 
often leads up declivities to be surmounted only 
by the st-anchest and most active hounds, and 
through thick forests and almost impassable 
swamps. 

In New England the hunt is for the red fox and 
his varieties, the silver and cross foxes. The gray 
fox of the South and West is almost, if not quite, 
unknown. From the tip of his nose to the root of 
his tail, the red fox measures about twenty-eight 
or thirty inches, his tail sixteen to eighteen inches 
including hair, and his height at the shoulders 
thirteen inches. His long fur and thick, bushy tail 
make him look larger and heavier than he is. Of 
several specimens which I have weighed, the 
largest tipped the beam at twelve pounds; the 
least at seven pounds. The general color is yellow- 



FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 19 

ish red; the outsides of the ears and the fronts of 
the legs and feet are black; the chin and usually the 
tip of the tail, white; and the tail darker than the 
body, most of its hairs being tipped with black. 
The eyes are near together and strongly express, 
as does the whole head, the alert and cunning na- 
ture of the animal. 

The cross fox, much scarcer than the red, is 
very beautiful. It is thus described by Thompson; 
"A blackish stripe passing from the neck down the 
back and another crossing it at right angles over 
the shoulders; sides, ferruginous, running into 
gray on the back; the chin, legs, and under parts of 
the body black, with a few hairs tipped with white; 
upper side of the tail, gray; under side and parts 
of the body adjacent, pale yellow; tail tipped with 
white. The cross upon the shoulders is not al- 
ways apparent, even in specimens which, from the 
fineness of the fur, are acknowledged to be cross 
foxes. Size the same as the common fox.*' 

The black or silver fox is so rare in New Eng- 
land that to see one is the event of a lifetime. 
The variety is as beautiful and valuable as rare. 
Its color is sometimes entirely of a shining black, 
except the white tip of the tail, but oftener of a 
silvery hue, owing to an intermixture of hairs 
tipped with white. It has probably always been 
uncommon here, for it is said to have been held 
in such estimation by the Indians of this region, 



20 FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 

that a silver fox-skin was equal in value to forty 
beaver-skins, and the gift of one was considered 
a sacred pledge. One often hears- of silver foxes 
being seen, but, hke the big fish so often lost by 
anglers, they almost invariably get away. 

Foxes are less rare in settled countries and on 
the borders of civilization than in the wilderness, 
for, though they find no fewer enemies, they find 
more abundant food in the open fields than in 
the forests. The common field mouse is a favor- 
ite in their bill-of-fare; and the farmer's lambs 
and the goodwife's geese and turkeys never come 
amiss therein. These are all more easily got than 
hares or grouse. In justice to Reynard it must be 
said, however, that when mice are plenty lambs 
and poultry are seldom molested. In times of 
scarcity, he takes kindly to beech-nuts in the 
fall, and fills himself with grasshoppers and such 
small deer in the summer. When these fail — why, 
what would you? An honest fox must live. 

When not running before the hounds, he is 
seldom seen in daytime, except it may be by 
some early riser whose sharp eye discerns him in 
the dim dawn, moving in meadow or pasture, op 
picking his stealthy way across lots to his home 
woods. In these woods he spends his days, sleep- 
ing or prowling slyly about in quest of some fool- 
ish hare or grouse. Going into the woods without 
a dog you might pass within a few yards of him 



FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 21 

and never suspect that his keen eyes were watch- 
ing you, or that the sHght rustle of fallen leaves 
you heard was caused by his departing footsteps, 
as he stole away with a tree between you and him. 

It is doubtful if the fox much resorts to his bur- 
rows except in great stress of weather and during 
the breeding season, or when driven to earth by 
relentless pursuit. For the most part, he takes 
his hours of ease curled up on some knoll, rock, 
or stump, his dense fur defying northern blasts 
and the "nipping and eager air" of the coldest 
winter night. Shelter from rain or snowstorms he 
undoubtedly will take, for he is not overfond of 
being bedraggled, though it is certain he will some- 
times take to the water and cross a stream with- 
out being driven to it. 

Reynard goes wooing in February, and travels 
far and wide in search of sweethearts, toying with 
every vixen he meets, but faithful to none, for his 
love is more fleeting than the tracks he leaves in 
the drifting snow. In April the vixen, having set 
her house in order by clearing it of rubbish, brings 
forth her young — from three to six or more at 
a litter. This house is sometimes a burrow in 
sandy soil with several entrances; sometimes a 
den in the rocks, and sometimes, in old woods, a 
hollow log. In four or five weeks the queer little 
pug-nosed cubs begin to play about the entrance. 
The mother hunts faithfully to provide them food, 



n FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 

and may sometimes be seen on her homeward way 
with a fringe of field mice hanging from her mouth. 
About the entrance to the den may be seen the 
wings of domestic poultry, wild ducks and grouse, 
and the legs of lambs — the fragments of many 
a vulpine feast. 

It is a curious fact, and one I have never seen 
mentioned in print, that while the cubs are de- 
pendent on the mother, a hound will only follow 
her for a few minutes. Of the existence of this pro- 
vision for the safety of the young foxes I have had 
ocular proof, confirmed by the statements of per- 
sons whom I believe. In June, 1868, an old vixen 
was making sad havoc with one of my neighbors* 
lambs, and an old fox-hunter was requested to 
take the field in their defense. He proceeded with 
his hounds (tolerably good ones) to the woods 
where her burrow was known to be, and put the 
dogs out. They soon started her and ran her out 
of the woods, but greatly to the surprise of the 
hunter they returned in a few moments, looking 
as shamefaced as whipped curs, with the old fox 
following them. Disgusted with the behavior of 
his own dogs, he sought the assistance of an 
old hound of celebrated qualities, belonging to a 
neighbor. She was put out with the other dogs, 
with just the same result. The vixen was, at last, 
shot while she was chasing the hounds, who then 
turned upon her, biting and shaking her as is 



FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 23 

their wont when a fox is killed before them; but 
my friend, the hunter, told me they were as sick 
and distressed as ever dogs were after an encoun- 
ter with a skunk. About the last of May, 1875, 
I witnessed a Hke incident. A stanch old hound 
of my own having accompanied me on a fish- 
ing excursion, started a fox in a piece of woods 
where a litter of young were known to be. Anx- 
ious to preserve the litter for sport in the fall, I 
hastened to call in the dog. I found him trotting 
along with lowered tail, the vixen leisurely trot- 
ting not more than five rods in advance, stopping 
every half-minute to bark at him, when he would 
stop till she again went on. I called him in as 
easily as if he had been nosing for a mouse, though 
under ordinary circumstances it would have re- 
quired a vigorous assertion of authority to have 
taken him off so hot a scent. 

If the life of the vixen is spared and she is not 
continually harassed by men or dogs during the 
breeding season, she will remain in the same lo- 
cality for years, and rear litter after litter there; 
perhaps not always inhabiting the same burrow, 
but one somewhere within the same piece of woods 
or on the same hill. If she is much disturbed, or 
if she perceives that her burrow is discovered, she 
speedily removes her young to another retreat. 
The young foxes continue to haunt the woods 
where they were reared for some months after 



24 FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 

they have ceased to require the care of their 
mother, and then disperse. The habits above 
mentioned are common to the cross and silver 
foxes as well as the red fox. 

And now for the hunt. From his helpless baby- 
hood in leafless April, Reynard has come, by the 
middle of the autumn, to months of discretion and 
to a large and increasing capacity for taking care 
of himself. The weapons are double-barrel shot- 
guns of such weight and caliber as may suit the 
individual fancy. A very light gun will not do the 
execution at the long range sometimes required, 
while, on the other hand, a very heavy one will 
become burdensome in the long tramps that may 
be necessary; for a man of ordinary strength, 
an eight-pound gun will be found quite heavy 
enough. It should be of a caliber which will prop- 
erly chamber its full charge of, at least, BB shot 
— for I hold that the force of lighter shot will be 
broken by the thick fur of the fox; indeed I would 
suggest still heavier pellets, say BBB, or even A. 

Our hounds, not so carefully bred as they 
should be, cannot be classed in any particular 
breed. They are more like the old Southern fox- 
hound, than like the modern English; and for our 
purpose are incomparably superior to the latter. 
They are not fleet, like him (fleetness here being 
objectionable, as will be shown), but of great 
endurance, and unsurpassable scenting powers — 



FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND. 25 

for they will follow a fox through all his devious 
windings and endless devices, from dawn till 
dark, through the night and for another day. Our 
best dogs are well described by Shakespeare in 
"Midsummer Night's Dream": 

** My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind. 
So flew'd, so sanded; and their heads are hung 
With ears that sweep away the morning dew; 
Crook-kneed, and dew-lapp'd like Thessalian bulls; 
Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells. 
Each under each." 

Their colors are blue-mottled, with patches of 
black and tan or yellow, with tan eye-patches; 
white, flecked with yellow, termed by old-time 
hunters, "punkin-an'-milk"; white and black and 
black and tan, with variations and admixtures of 
all these colors. It is an old saying, "that a good 
horse cannot be of a bad color"; and the color of 
a hound is more a matter of fancy than of excel- 
lence. A loud and melodious voice is a most de- 
sirable quality, and this many of our native fox- 
dogs possess in perfection. A hound with a weak 
voice is a constant worry, and one with a discord- 
ant voice vexes the ear. 

When the game is started the dog should con- 
tinually give tongue, so that you (and the fox as 
well) may always know just where he is. The 
wrinkled brows and foreheads, and long, pendent 
ears and flews of many of these dogs, give them an 
extremely sad and troubled expression from which 



26 FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 

one might suppose their Hves were "fu' o' sari- 
ousness." Perhaps (who knows?) this solemn cast 
of visage comes of much pondering on the knavish 
tricks of the wily fox, and of schemes for circum- 
venting his many artifices. Their tails are not at 
all inclined to be bushy, like those of the English 
fox-hounds of the present day, but are almost as 
slender and clean as the tail of the pointer. 

It is the early morning of one of the perfect days 
of late October or early November. In the soft 
gray light of the growing day the herbage of the 
pastures and the aftermath of the meadows are 
pearly with frost which is thick and white on 
boards and fence-rails. The air is chill, but un- 
stirred by the lightest breeze, and if the day keeps 
the promise of the morning it will be quite warm 
enough for comfortable tramping when the sun is 
fairly up. The hounds, called from their straw, 
come yawning and limping forth, stiff from the 
chase of yesterday, but are electrified with new 
life by the sight of the guns. They career about, 
sounding bugle-notes that wake the echoes for a 
mile around. Reynard at the wood-edge, home- 
ward bound from his mousing or poultry-stealing, 
is warned that this is to be no holiday for him. 
Very likely the hounds are too eager for the hunt 
to eat their morning Johnny-cake ; if so, let them 
have their way — they will gobble it ravenously 
enough to-night, if they have the chance. 



FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 27 

And now, away ! across the frosty fields toward 
yonder low hill which we dignify with the name of 
mountain. No song-birds now welcome the com- 
ing day; almost the only sound which breaks the 
gray serenity is the clamor of a flock of crows in 
the distant woods, announcing their awakening to 
another day of southward journeying, or the chal- 
lenge of a cock in a far-off farmyard. As you 
hurry across the home pasture, the cows stop 
chewing the cud, to stare curiously at hounds and 
hunters, and then arise, sighing and stretching, 
from their couches on the dry knolls. A flock of 
sheep start from their huddled repose and scurry 
away, halting at a little distance to snort and 
stamp at the rude disturbers of their early medi- 
tations. Almost the only signs of life are these 
and the upward-crawling smoke of kitchen chim- 
neys, where sluggards are just making their first 
preparations for breakfast. Yours has been eaten 
this half-hour. 

The old dog plods along, with serious and busi- 
ness-like air, disdaining and repelling all attempts 
of his younger companion to beguile him into any 
unseemly gambols; but when you cross the fence 
which bounds the pasture lying along the foot of 
the hill, where the rank grass, mixed with last 
year's growth, is ankle-deep, and where grass 
and innumerable stumps and logs afford harbor 
for colonies of field mice, you find "there is life 



28 FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 

in the old dog yet." He halts for an instant and 
snuffs the air; draws toward a tuft of grass and 
noses it carefully; his sensitive nostrils dilate; his 
staid and sober tail begins, not to wag, but to 
describe circles; the serious lines of his brow be- 
come a frown; he mounts that log and snuffs it 
from end to end and back again with studious 
care. There has been a fox here, but which way 
has he gone? Never fear that the old dog will not 
tell you soon, but by what marvelous faculty he 
finds it out, who but a dog can tell? Alas! such 
niceties of his language are a sealed book to us. 
Now his loud, eager snuffing has grown to a sup- 
pressed challenge, and every muscle seems strained 
to its utmost tension as he leaves the log and 
makes a few lopes toward the woods, stops for 
an instant as if turned to stone, raises his good 
gray muzzle skyward, and awakens all the woods 
and hills with his deep, sonorous voice ! That way 
has Reynard gone, and that bugle-note has per- 
haps given him premonition of his doom. This 
note has recalled the young dog from his wild 
ranging, and he joins his older and wiser com- 
panion, without bringing much aid, however, for, 
catching the scent, he proclaims his discovery 
till long after he has overrun it, now and then 
slightly disconcerting the old truth-teller; but the 
veteran soon learns to ignore the youngster and 
works his way steadily toward the wooded edge 



FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 29 

of the hill, never increasing his speed nor abating 
the carefulness of his scenting. Now his tuneful 
notes become more frequent. If you have the 
heart of a fox-hunter, they are the sweetest mu- 
sic to your ears in all the world. Up the steep 
side of the hill he takes his way, the young dog 
following, and both giving tongue from time to 
time. They slowly work the trail to the top of an 
overhanging ledge and, now, there is a hush, but, 
almost before the echo of their last notes has died, 
forth bursts a wild storm of canine music. Rey- 
nard is afoot; or, as we Yankees say, "The fox 
is started," and the reeking scent of his recent 
footsteps steams hot in the nostrils of his pur- 
suers. The hounds are now out of sight, but you 
hear every note of their jubilant song as they 
describe a small circle beyond the ledge, and then 
go northward along the crest of the hill. Their 
baying grows fainter and fainter as they bear 
away to the farther side, till at last it is almost 
drowned by the gurgle of the brook. 

Now, get with all speed to ''the Notch," which 
divides the north from the south hill, for this the 
fox will pretty surely cross when he comes back, 
if back he comes, after making a turn or two or 
three at the north end. On this habit of his, of 
running in circles, and in certain runways as he 
goes from hill to hill, or from wood to wood, is 
founded our method of hunting him. If he "plays" 



30 FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 

in small circles, encompassing an acre or so, as he 
often will for half an hour at a time before a slow 
dog, you cautiously work up to leeward of him and 
try your chances for a shot. If he encircles the 
whole hill or crosses from hill to hill, there are 
certain points which every fox, whether stranger 
or to this particular woodland born, is likely to take 
in his way, but not sure to do so. Having learned 
these points by hearsay or experience, you take 
your post at the nearest or likeliest one, and 
between hope and fear await your opportunity. 
Such a place is this Notch, toward which with 
hasty steps and beating heart you take your way. 
When the fox returns, if he crosses to the south 
hill, he will come down that depression between 
the ledges which you face; then cross the brook 
and come straight in front of you, toward the 
wood-road in which you stand, or else turn off to 
the right to cross the road and go up that easy 
slope to the south hill, or turn to the left and cross 
on the other hand. Standing midway between 
these points, either is a long gun-shot off, but it is 
the best place to post yourself; so here take breath 
and steady your nerves. 

How still the woods are! The hounds are out 
of hearing a mile away. No breeze sighs through 
the pines or stirs the fallen leaves. The trickle of 
the brook, the penny trumpet of a nuthatch, the 
light hammering of a downy woodpecker are the 



FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 31 

only sounds the strained ear catches. All about 
rise the gray tree-trunks; overhead, against the 
blue-gray sky is spread their net of branches, with 
here and there a tuft of russet and golden and 
scarlet leaves caught in its meshes. At your feet 
on every side lie the fading and faded leaves, but 
bearing still a hundred hues; and through them 
rise tufts of green fern, brown stems of infant trees 
and withered plants; frost-blackened beech-drops, 
spikes of the dull azure berries of the blue cohosh, 
and milk-white ones, crimson-stemmed, of the 
white cohosh; scarlet clusters of wild turnip ber- 
ries; pale asters and slender goldenrod, but all so 
harmoniously blended that no one object stands 
forth conspicuously. So kindly does Nature screen 
her children that in this pervading gray and russet, 
beast and bird, blossom and gaudy leaf, may lurk 
unnoticed almost at your feet. The rising sun 
begins to glorify the tree-tops. And now a red 
squirrel startles you, rustling noisily through the 
leaves. He scrambles up a tree, and with nervous 
twitches of feet and tail snickers and scolds till 
you feel almost wicked enough to end his clatter 
with a charge of shot. A blue jay has spied you and. 
comes to upbraid you with his discordant voice. 
A party of chickadees draws nigh, flitting close 
about and pecking the lichened trunks and 
branches almost within arm's length, satisfying 
curiosity and hunger together. 



32 FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 

At last, above the voices of these garrulous vis- 
itors, your ear discerns the baying of the hounds, 
faint and far away, swelling, dying, swelling, but 
surely drawing nearer. Louder rings the "musical 
confusion of hounds and echo in conjunction,*' 
as the dogs break over the hill-top. Now, eyes 
and ears, look and listen your sharpest. Bring 
the butt of your gun to your shoulder and be 
motionless and noiseless as death, for if at two 
gun-shots off Reynard sees even the movement of 
a hand or a turn of the head, he will put a tree- 
trunk between you and him, and vanish altogether 
and "leave you there lamenting.'* 

Is that the patter of feet in the dry leaves or 
did the sleeping air awake enough to stir them? 
Is that the fox.f^ Pshaw! no — only a red squirrel 
scurrying along a fallen tree. Is that quick, muffled 
thud the drum of a partridge.'* No, it never reaches 
the final roll of his performance. It is only the 
beating of your own heart. But now you hear the 
unmistakable nervous rustle of Reynard's foot- 
steps in the leaves; now bounding with long leaps, 
now picking his way; now unheard for an instant 
as he halts to listen. A yellow-red spot grows out 
of the russet leaves, and that is he, coming straight 
toward you. A gun-shot and a half away, he stops 
on a knoll and turns halfway around to listen for 
the dogs. In awful suspense you wonder if he will 
come right on or sheer off and baffle you. But a 



FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 33 * 

louder sounding of the charge by his pursuers 
sends him onward right toward you. His face is 
a study as he gallops leisurely along listening and 
plotting. He picks his way for a few yards along 
the outcropping stones in the bed of the brook, 
and then begins to climb the slope diagonally to- 
ward you. He is only fifty yards off when you 
raise the muzzle of your gun, drop your cheek to 
the stock, and aim a little forward of his nose; 
your finger presses the trigger and while the loud 
report is rebounding from wood to hill, you peer 
anxiously through the hanging smoke to learn 
whether you have cause for joy or mortification. 
Ah ! there he lies, done to death, despite his speed 
and cunning. The old dog follows his every foot- 
step to the spot where he lies, stops for a breath 
in a half surprise as he comes upon him, then 
seizes him by the back, shaking him savagely, and 
biting him from shoulders to hips. Let him mouth 
his fallen foe to his heart's content, no matter how 
he rumples the sleek fur; it is his only recompense 
for the faithful service he has so well performed. 
And now the young dog comes up and claims his 
reward, and be sure this morning's work will go 
far toward making him as stanch and true as his 
chase-worn leader. 

The shade of sadness for a moment indulged 
over the vigorous life so suddenly ended by your 
shot is but a passing cloud on the serene happiness 



S4 FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 

you feel at having acquitted yourself so well. If 
you had missed him, it would have been but small 
consolation to think the fox was safe. The hounds 
having had their just dues in mouthing and shak- 
ing, you strip off Reynard's furry coat — for if 
English lords may, without disgrace, sell the game 
they kill in their battues, surely a humble Yankee 
fox-hunter may save and sell the pelt of his fox 
without incurring the stigma of "pot-hunter." 
At least he may bear home the brush with skin 
attached, as a trophy. 

But think not thus early nor with such success- 
ful issue is every chase to close. This was ended 
before the fox had used any other trick for baffling 
the hounds but his simplest one of running in 
circles. An hour or two later, an old fox, finding 
the dogs still holding persistently to all the wind- 
ings of his trail, would have sped away to another 
hill or wood a mile or so off, and would have 
crossed newly ploughed fields, the fresh earth 
leaving no tell-tale scent; would have taken to 
traveled highways, where dust and the hoofs of 
horses and the footsteps of men combine to ob- 
literate the traces of his passage; or have trod 
gingerly along many lengths of the top rails of a 
fence and then have sprung off at right angles 
from it to the ground, ten feet away; and then, 
perhaps, have run through a flock of sheep, the 
strong odor of whose feet blots out the scent of his. 



FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND S5 

These artifices quite bewilder and baflSe the young 
dog, but only delay the elder who knows of old 
the tricks of foxes. Nothing can be more admirable 
than the manner of his working as he comes to the 
edge of the ploughed field. He wastes no time in 
useless pottering among the fresh-turned furrows, 
but with rapid lopes skirts their swarded border, 
till, at a far corner, his speed slackens as his keen 
nose catches the scent again in the damp grass; he 
snuffs at it an instant to assure himself, then 
sounds a loud, melodious note, and goes on baying 
at every lope till the road is reached. Along this 
he zigzags till he finds where the fox has left it. 
And now comes the puzzling bit of fence. The old 
dog thinks the fox has gone through it; he goes 
through it himself, but finds no scent there; puz- 
zles about rapidly, now trying this side, now that; 
at last he bethinks himself of the top, to which he 
clambers and there finds the missing trail. But 
his big feet cannot tread the "giddy footing" of 
the rail as could Reynard's dainty pads, so down 
he goes and tries on either side for the point where 
the fox left the fence. Ranging up and down, too 
near it to hit the spot where Reynard struck the 
ground, he fails to recover the scent, stops — 
raises his nose and utters a long, mournful howl, 
half vexation, half despair. Now he climbs to the 
top rail farther on and snuffs it there. **No taint 
of a fox's foot is here," so he reasons, "and he must 



36 FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 

have jumped from the fence between here and 
the place where I found it," and acting on this 
logical conclusion, he circles widely till he has 
picked up the trail once more, and goes merrily 
on to the sheep pasture. Here, satisfying himse.f 
of the character of this trick, he adopts the same 
plan employed at the ploughed field, and after 
a little finds the trail on the other side and follows 
it to the hill, but more slowly now, for the fox has 
been gone some time; the frost has melted, the 
moisture is exhaling and the scent growing cold. 

The fox has long since reached the hill and half 
encircled it, and now hearing the voices of the 
hounds so far away and so slowly nearing, has be- 
stowed himself on the mossy cushion of a knoll for 
rest and cogitation. Here he lies for a half-hour 
or more, but always alert and listening while the 
dogs draw slowly on, now almost losing the trail 
on a dry ledge, now catching it in a moist, propi- 
tious hollow, till at last a nearer burst warns poor 
sly-boots that he must again up and away. He 
may circle about or " play," as we term it, on this 
hill, till you have reached a runway on it where 
you may get a shot; or, when you have toiled 
painfully up the steep western pitch and have just 
reached the top, blown, leg-weary, but expectant, 
he will, probably, utterly disappoint and exasper- 
ate you by leaving this hill and returning to the 
one he and you have so lately quitted, yea, he will 



FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 37 

even intensify the bitterness of your heart by tak- 
ing in his way one or two or three points where 
you were standing half an hour ago! What is to 
be done? He may run for hours now on the hill 
where he was started, or he may be back here 
again before the hunter can have regained that. 
To hesitate may be to lose, may be to gain, the 
coveted shot. One must choose as soon as may 
be and take his chances. If two persons are hunt- 
ing in company, one should keep to this hill, the 
other to that, or while on the same hill, or in 
the same wood, each to his chosen runway, thus 
doubling the chances of a shot. 

At last the hounds may be heard baying con- 
tinuously in one place, and by this and their pe- 
culiar intonation, one may know that the fox, 
finding his tricks unavailing, has run to earth, or, 
as we have it, "has holed." Guided to his retreat 
by the voices of the hounds, you find them there, 
by turns baying angrily and impatiently and 
tearing away, tooth and nail, the obstructing roots 
and earth. If in a sandy or loamy bank, the fox 
may, with pick and spade, be dug ignominiously 
forth, but this savors strongly of pot-hunting. If 
he has taken sanctuary in a rocky den, where pick 
and spade avail not, there is nothing for it but to 
call the dogs off and try for another fox to-day, or 
for this one to-morrow, when he shall have come 
forth again. This is the manlier part, in either 



38 FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 

case for Reynard has fairly baffled you, has run 
his course and reached his goal in safety. 

Sometimes an old fox, when he hears the first 
note of the hounds on the trail he made when he 
was mousing under the paling stars, will arise 
from his bed and make off at once over dry ledges, 
ploughed fields, and sheep pastures, leaving for 
the dogs nothing but a cold, puzzling scent, which, 
growing fainter as the day advances and the mois- 
ture exhales, they are obliged, unwillingly, to aban- 
don at last, after hours of slow and painstaking 
work. A wise old hound will often, in such cases, 
give over trying to work up the uncertain trail, 
and guessing at the direction the fox has taken, 
push on, running mute, at the top of his speed to 
the likeliest piece of woodland, a mile away, per- 
haps, and there with loud rejoicings pick up the 
trail. When after a whole day's chase, during 
which hope and disappointment have often and 
rapidly succeeded each other in the hunter's 
breast, having followed the fox with untiring zeal 
through all the crooks and turns of his devious 
course, and unraveled with faultless nose and 
the sagacity born of thought and experience his 
every trick — the good dogs bring him at the last 
moment of the gloaming within range, and by the 
shot, taken darkling, Reynard is tumbled dead 
among the brown leaves, great is the exultation of 
hunter and hound, and great the happiness that 



FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 39 

fills their hearts. After tramping since early 
morning over miles of the likeliest "starting- 
places" without finding any trail but cold and 
scentless ones made in the early night, and so old 
that the dogs cannot work them out, as the hunter 
takes his way in the afternoon through some piece 
of woodland, his hounds, as discouraged as he, 
with drooping tails and increased sorrow in their 
sad faces, plodding dejected at heel or ranging 
languidly, it is a happy surprise to have them halt. 
With raised muzzles and half-closed eyes, they 
snuff the air, then draw slowly up wind with ele- 
vated noses, till they are lost to sight behind gray 
trunks and mossy logs and withered brakes, and 
then, with a crashing flourish of trumpets, they 
announce that at last a fox has been found, traced 
to his lair by a breeze-borne aroma so subtle that 
the sense which detects it is a constant marvel. A 
fox started so late in the day seems loath to leave 
his wood, and is apt to play there till a shot gives 
hunter and hounds their reward. 

When one sees in the snow the intricate wind- 
ings and crossings and recrossings of the trail of 
a mousing fox, he can but wonder how any dog 
by his nose alone can untangle such a knotted 
thread till it shall lead him to the place where the 
fox has laid up for the day; yet this a good hound 
will unerringly do if the scent has not become too 
cold. To see him do this and to follow all his care- 



40 FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 

ful, sagacious work are in no wise the least of the 
pleasures of this sport. 

It is a favorite season for fox-hunting when the 
first snows have fallen, for though the walking is 
not so good, and hounds are often much inclined 
to follow the track by sight as well as by smell, the 
tell-tale footprints show pretty plainly which way 
the fox has gone, how long he has been gone, and 
whether it is worth your while to allow the dogs 
to follow his trail; and you are enabled to help the 
hounds in puzzling places, though a dog of wisdom 
and experience seldom needs help, except for the 
saving of time. A calm day is always best, and if 
warm enough for the snow to pack without being 
at all "sposhy," so much the better. Though it is 
difficult to "start" a fox during a heavy snowfall, 
if you do start him he is pretty certain to "play" 
beautifully, seeming to reckon much on the oblit- 
eration of his track by the falling snow. At such 
times he will often circle an hour in the compass of 
two or three acres. Glare ice holds scent scarcely 
more than water. This no one knows better than 
the fox, and you may be sure he will now profit by 
this knowledge if naked ice can be found. He 
will also run in the paths of the hare, pick his way 
carefully along rocky ridges, which have been 
swept bare of snow by the wind, leaving no visible 
trace of his passage, and, at times, take to traveled 
highways. If the snow is deep and light so that he 



FOX-HUNTING IN NEW ENGLAND 41 

sinks into it, he will soon, through fatigue or fear 
of being caught, take refuge in den or burrow. If 
the snow has a crust which bears him, but through 
which the heavier hounds break at every step, he 
laughs them to scorn as he trips leisurely along at a 
tantalizingly short distance before them. Hunting 
in such seasons is weary work, and more desirable, 
then, is the solace of book and pipe by the cozy fire- 
side, where the hounds lie sleeping and dreaming of 
glorious days of sport already past or soon to come. 
In winter as in autumn, the sport is invigorat- 
ing and exciting, and Nature has, now as ever, her 
endless beauties and secrets for him who hath eyes 
to behold them. To such they are manifold in all 
seasons and he is feasted full, whether from the 
bald hill-top he looks forth over a wide expanse of 
gorgeous woods and fields, still green under Octo- 
ber skies, or sees them brown and sere through 
the dim November haze, or spread white and far 
with December snows. The truest sportsman is 
not a mere skillful butcher, who is quite unsatis- 
fied if he returns from the chase without blood upon 
his garments, but he who bears home from field and 
forest something better than game and peltry and 
the triumph of a slayer, and who counts the day not 
lost nor ill spent though he can show no trophy of 
his skill. The beautiful things seen, the ways of 
beasts and birds noted, are what he treasures far 
longer than the number of successful shots. 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 

Poets have sung the delights of the farmer's life 
in strains so enchanting that one might wonder 
why all the world has not forsaken every other 
pursuit and betaken itself to the tilling of the soil. 
But the farmer himself, in the unshaded hay-field, 
or plodding in the clayey furrow at the tail of his 
plough, with a freeholder's right sticking to each 
boot, or bending, with aching back, between the 
corn-rows, or breasting the winter storms in the 
performance of imperative duties, looks at his 
life from a different point of view. To him this 
life appears as full of toil and care and evil chances 
as that of any other toiler. And true it is, the life 
of an ordinary farmer is hard, with too little to 
soften it — too much of work, too little of play. But 
as true is what the poet sang so long ago: "Thrice 
happy are the husbandmen if they could but see 
their blessings"; for they have independence, 
more than any others who by the sweat of the 
brow earn their bread, and the pure air of heaven 
to breathe, and the blessed privilege of daily com- 
munion with nature. 

It is not easy for the farmer to see any beauty 
in his enemies — the meadows full of daisies, with 
which he is forever fighting, or by which he has 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 43 

been ignominiously conquered; the encroaching 
ranks of goldenrods along the borders of his fields, 
and the bristling bayonets of those Canadian in- 
vaders, the thistles. How few farmers, or other 
people for that matter, see in the climbing blushes 
of the dawning day, or the gorgeous painting of 
its close, or in the perfect day itself, anything but 
the foretelling of fair or foul weather; or notice the 
ways of any untamed bird or beast, except that 
the crows come to pull the corn, the hawks to 
catch the chickens, and the foxes to steal the 
Iambs and turkeys. However, the farmer gen- 
erally does feel a thrill of pleasure when, in the 
hazy softness of a February or March day, he 
hears the caw of the first carrion-seeking, hungry 
crow. "The heart of winter is broken." In April 
when the fields begin to show a suspicion of com- 
ing green and give forth an odor of spring, and 
the dingy snowbanks along the fences are daily 
dwindling, he welcomes the carol of the first blue- 
bird, and is glad to hear the robin utter his rest- 
less note from the boughs of the old apple-tree; 
and the clear voice of the new-come meadowlark 
strikes him as not altogether unmusical; and when 
he hears the plaintive cry of the grass-plover he 
is sure spring has come. Then he thinks of the 
small birds no more till the first blasts of return- 
ing winter sweep over the bare trees and frozen 
fields, when, all at once, he becomes aware that 



44r DANVIS FARM LIFE 

the troubadours are gone. He sees that the brave 
Httle chickadee remains faithful to his post, and 
feels that his cheery note enlivens a little the 
dreariness of winter, as does the reedy piping of the 
nuthatch and the voice of the downy, fuller of 
life than of music, and the discordant note of the 
blue jay, who, clad in a bit of summer sky, loudly 
proclaims his presence; but the singers are gone 
and the farmer misses them. 

Winter is fairly upon us at last, though by such 
gradual approaches has it come that we are hardly 
aware of its presence, for its white seal is not yet 
set upon the earth. Till then we have a feeling 
that the fall is not over. The mud of the highways 
is turned to stone, the bare gray trees and dun 
fields have no semblance of life in them, and the 
dull, cold sky and the black-green pines and hem- 
locks look colder than snow. The Thanksgiving 
turkey has been disposed of, and the young folks 
begin to count the days to Christmas. The old 
house has been "banked" for weeks, making the 
cellar a rayless dungeon, from which cider and 
winter apples are now brought forth to help while 
away the long evenings. At no time of the day is 
the fire's warmth unwelcome. But no snow has 
come except in brief flurries; and the cattle are 
out on the meadows in the daytime cropping the 
withered aftermath, and the sheep are yet in the 
pastures or straying in the bordering woods. 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 45 

But now comes an afternoon with a breathless 
chill in it — "a hard, dull bitterness of cold"; 
when the gray sky settles down upon the earth, 
covering, first, the blue, far-away mountains with 
a gray pall, then the nearer, somber hills with a 
veil through which their rough outlines show but 
dimly, and are quite hidden when the coming 
snowfall makes phantoms of the sturdy trees in 
the woods hard by. Then roofs and roads and 
fence-tops and grassless ground begin slowly to 
whiten, and boughs and twigs are traced with a 
faint white outline against a gray background, and 
the dull yellow of the fields grows paler under the 
falling snow, and a flock of snowbirds drifts across 
the fading landscape like larger snowflakes. The 
nightfall comes early, and going out on the back 
stoop you find yourself on a little island in a great 
sea of misty whiteness, out of which looms dimly 
the dusky barn, with its freight of live-stock, 
grain, and hay, the only ship within hail. 

Aroused next morning by the stamping feet of 
the first risers who have gone forth to explore, we 
find that a new world seems to have drifted to us 
while we were lying fast anchored to the old chim- 
ney. Roofs are heaped and fences coped and trees 
are whiter than in May with bloom, with the uni- 
versal snow. The great farm-wagon, standing 
half hub-deep in it, looks as out of place as if at 
sea. The dazed fowls peer wonderingly from the 



46 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

poultry-house, or, adventuring short trips there- 
from, stop bewildered midway in their journey. 
Presently the gray objects rising out of the strange 
white expanse take on more familiar shapes, and 
we recognize the barn, the orchard (though it has 
an unsubstantial look, as if the first wind might 
blow it away or an hour's warm sunshine melt it), 
the well-known trees, the neighbors' houses, the 
faint lines of the fences tracing the boundaries of 
fields and farms, the woods, and beyond them the 
unchanged outlines of wooded hills and the far- 
away mountains, but with a new ruggedness in 
their sides and with new clearings, till now un- 
known, showing forth in white patches on their 
slopes. We may take our time, for we shall have 
long months in which to get acquainted with this 
changed world. 

The first day of snow is a busy one. If the snow- 
fall is great, there are paths to be shoveled to 
the outbuildings, and wagons to be housed, and 
sleighs to be got out and made ready, and many 
little jobs, put off from time to time, to be at- 
tended to. Perhaps there are young cattle, home- 
less and unfed in the out-lot, lowing piteously, to 
be brought to winter quarters, and sheep to be 
brought home from their pasture. Happy are the 
boys if to them is allotted this task, for the sheep 
are sure to have sought the shelter of the woods, 
and in the woods what strange sights may not be 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 47 

seen! With trousers tied at ankle they trudge 
across the white fields, pathless and untracked 
save where old Dobbin, scorning barnyard and 
shelter, with whitened back and icicled sides, paws 
away the snow down to the withered grass which 
he crops with as great apparent relish as if it was 
the herbage of June. 

Across meadow and pasture to the woodland the 
youngsters go, and take the old wood-road, now 
only a winding streak of white through the gray 
of tree-trunks and outcropping rocks, its autumnal 
border of asters, goldenrods, and ferns all lain 
down to sleep beneath the snow. Here Reynard's 
track crosses it, he having gone forth hare- or 
partridge-hunting, and so lately passed that the 
human nose can almost catch the scent of his foot- 
steps — what an ecstatic song the old hound would 
sing over it ! Here is the trail of the gray squirrel, 
where he scampered from tree to tree — one pair 
of little tracks and one pair of larger ones, as if 
two-legged animals had made them; and here is 
a maze of larger footprints, where the hare's broad 
pads have made their faint impress on the snow. 
Jays scream overhead and chickadees flit from 
tree to tree along the roadside. Now, almost at 
their feet, a ruffed grouse breaks forth from his 
snowy covering in a little whirlwind of his own 
making, and goes off with a startling whir and 
clatter through the snow-laden branches, a dusky 



48 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

meteor. From a near branch in the twilight of a 
thicket a great horned owl flies away, noiseless as 
a ghost. With so much to interest them the boys 
almost forget their errand till they come upon the 
faint trail of the sheep. Slowly working this out, 
they at last find the flock wandering aimlessly 
about nibbling such twigs and withered leaves 
as are within their reach. Their sojourn in the 
woods, brief as it has been, has given them back 
something of the original wildness of their race. 
They mistrust man of evil designs against them 
when they meet him in the woods, and run from 
the sheep-call, "ca-day!" "ca-day!'* which in 
the open fields would bring them in an eager 
throng about the caller. But civilization has made 
them dependent, as it has their masters, and they 
flee homeward for safety, and the boys follow 
them out through the snowy arches of the woods 
to the pasture, and so home to the snug quarters 
where they are to pass the dead months. 

The first foddering is bestowed in the racks, and 
all the woolly crew fall to with a will and a busy 
snapping of many jaws. And so, at nine in the 
morning and at three in the afternoon, are they 
to be fed till the pastures are green again in May. 

Happier they than the hardy "native" sheep 
of their owner's grandfather, which had no shel- 
ter but the lee of the stack that they were fed 
from in the bleak meadow, pelted by cruel winds 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 49 

and sometimes so snowed in that they had to 
be released from their imprisonment by dint of 
much shoveUng. This old-time foddering, which 
was the fare of all the stock but the horses and 
working oxen, though sadly lacking in comfort 
for feeder and fed, was very picturesque: the 
farmer, in blue-mixed smock-frock of homespun 
woolen, pitching down the great forkfuls from the 
stack; the kine and sheep crowding and jostling 
for the first place on the leeward side, or chasing 
wisps of wind-tossed hay down wind; then the 
farmer distributing the fodder in little piles, fol- 
lowed by all the herd, each thinking (as who does 
not?) that what he has not is better than what he 
has; the strong making might right; the poor 
underling, content to snatch the scant mouthfuls, 
overrun by the stronger brethren — all in a busy 
throng about the rail pen from which rises the 
dun truncated cone of the stack, their only har- 
bor in the wide, white sea. A path, to be freshly 
broken after every wind or snowfall, leads to the 
water-holes, chopped out every morning in the 
brook, some furlongs off, whither they wend their 
way in lazy lines as the day grows older. But 
no one need mourn the passing away of this 
old custom; for the later warm stables, sheds, 
and barnyards, with their contented and well- 
sheltered inmates, are comfortable as well as 
picturesque. 



50 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

A pleasant thing to look upon is an old gray 
barn with its clustering sheds, straw-stacks, and 
well-fenced yards; in this the cattle taking their 
day's outing from the stable; in that the sheep 
feeding from their racks or chewing the cud of 
contentment, or making frequent trips to the 
water-trough in the corner. 

Inside is the broad *'barn floor," with grain 
scaffolds above it, and on one side a great "bay" 
filled with hay; on the other, the stable for the 
cows; and over this a "mow." In the mysterious 
heights above, whose dusty gloom is pierced by 
bolts of sunshine, are dimly seen the cobwebbed 
rafters and the deserted nests of the swallows. 

On this floor, in winter days, the threshers' 
flails are beating out the rye with measured throb. 
Chanticleer and Partlet and all their folk come 
to the wide-open southern doors to pick the scat- 
tered kernels, and the cattle "toss their white 
horns" in their stanchions and look with wonder 
in their soft eyes on this unaccountable pounding 
of straw. Then, when the "cave" (as the long pile 
of unwinnowed grain on one side the floor is 
called) has become so large as to narrow too much 
the threshing-room, the fanning-mill is brought 
from its corner, and amid clatter and clouds of 
dust the grain is "cleaned up" and carried away 
to the granary. Here, too, in the early morning 
comes the farmer or his man to fodder the cows 



DANVIS FAEM LIFE 51 

by lantern-light, and to milk the "winter cow" 
whose meager, foamless "mess" alone now fur- 
nishes the household all the milk it has. 

The early chores done, breakfast comes when 
goodman and goodwife, — as Gervase Markham 
delights to style the farmer and his wife, — their 
children and hired folk, all gather about the long 
table in the big kitchen, and doughty trencher 
men and women prove themselves every one. 
The fried pork, or sausages, or beefsteak, — let us 
hope not fried, — or cold roast beef, left from 
yesterday's dinner, the potatoes, the wheaten and 
"rye-'n'-injun" bread, the johnny-cake or buck- 
wheat-cakes, the apple-sauce, the milk and the 
butter, colored with October's gold, and likely 
enough the sugar, are all home-grown; nothing 
"boughten" but the tea or coffee and the pepper 
and salt. 

After breakfast the children, with books and 
dinner-pails and "shining morning faces," set out 
for school; but not "creeping unwillingly," for 
there will be plenty of fun there at "recess" and 
nooning, with sleds and snowballing and no end 
of outdoor winter games. 

The sheep are fed and then some work of the 
day begins. Perhaps it is threshing or drawing 
wood home or to the market from the "woodlot " 
where a man is chopping "by the cord." He is, 
likely enough, a light-hearted "Canuck" fresh 



52 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

from his Canadian home, as yet un-Yankeefied 
and unspoiled; garrulous with his droll French- 
English ; as ready as another to laugh at his own 
mistakes; picturesque in his peaked woolen cap 
and coarse, oddly fashioned dress of homespun 
gray with red-sashed waist and moccasined feet. 

A skillful wielder of the axe is he, and, though a 
passably loyal subject of a queen, with no whit of 
reverence for these ancient monarchs of the forest 
which he hews down relentlessly, regardless of 
their groans as they topple to their fall. He has 
brought an acre or more of the woods' white floor 
face to face with the steel-blue winter sky, and all 
over the little waste are piled in cords and half- 
cords the bodies of the slain kings, about whose 
vacant mossed and lichened thrones are heaped 
their crowTis in ignominious piles. He has a fire, 
more for company than for warmth, whereat he 
often lights his short, blackened clay pipe and sits 
by while he eats his half-frozen dinner and while 
the smoke fills the woods about with a blue haze 
and a pungent fragrance. 

Here, now, comes the farmer, mounted on his 
stout sled with its long wood-rack, driving his 
steaming horses which he blankets while he makes 
his load. He exchanges with the chopper badly 
fashioned sentences of very bad French for rat- 
tling volleys of no better English, upbraiding him, 
perhaps, for piling his wood with bark down, or 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 63 

for an intermixture of crooked and knotty sticks, 
— devices well known to professional choppers for 
making piles measure large, — a charge which the 
Canadian repels with loud protestations of hon- 
esty and frantic gestures, or pretends not to un- 
derstand. His sled laden, the farmer leaves the 
regicide to his slaughter and wends his creaking 
way homeward along the gray-pillared arcade of 
the narrow, winding wood-road, whose brushy 
border scrapes and clatters against the jagged load 
as it passes. This and the muffled tread of the 
horses and the creaking of the runners in the snow, 
the fainter-growing axe-strokes, and now and 
then the booming downfall of a great tree, are the 
few sounds that break the winter stillness of the 
woods. The partridge looks down on him from its 
safe perch in the thick-branched hemlock. A hare 
bounds across the road before him, as white and 
silent as the snow beneath its feet. An unseen fox 
steals away with noiseless footsteps. Driving out 
of the sheltering woods into the wind-swept fields, 
here through deep-drifted hollows, there over 
ridges blown so nearly bare that the bleached grass 
rustles above the thin snow, he fares homeward, 
or to the well-beaten highway, and by it to the 
market in the village or at the railroad. 

He is apt to tarry long at the village store, un- 
der the plausible pretext of getting thoroughly 
warm, and likely enough gossips with neighbors 



54 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

or cheapens the storekeeper's wares till "chore- 
time " draws nigh. 

Loads of logs are drawn to the sawmill, a 
quaint old structure whose mossy beams have 
spanned its swift raceway for half a century or 
more. The green ooze of the leaky flume turns the 
icicles to spikes of emerald, and the caves beneath 
the log dam have crystal portals of fantastic 
shapes. Heaps of logs and piles of boards and 
slabs environ it on the landward side, and a pleas- 
ant odor of freshly cut pine pervades the neigh- 
borhood. Its interior is as comfortless in winter 
as a hill-top, "cold as a sawmill" being a New 
England proverb; and it is often said of one who 
leaves outer doors open in cold weather, "Guess 
he was brought up in a sawmill, where there 
wa'n't no doors." It is a poor lounging-place now 
for our farmer, but the dusty gristmill hard by 
offers greater attractions. Maybe he has brought 
a grist atop of his logs, and has good excuse to 
toast his shins by the miller's glowing stove 
while he waits the grinding. 

On the millpond, alder-fringed and overhung 
by lithe-limbed birches, the farmers gather their 
ice-crop, one that New England winters never 
fail to produce most bountifully. Simpler tools 
are used here than are employed by the great ice 
companies of the cities. The same cross-cut saw 
that cuts the logs with a man at each handle is 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 55 

used here by one man (one handle being taken 
out) for cutting the ice, which is then drawn out 
of the water with ordinary ice-tongs and carried 
home, a regal freight of a dozen or more great 
blocks of crystal at a load. 

The hay for market is hauled in bulk to the 
large stationary presses on the line of the railroad, 
or pressed into bales by portable presses set up at 
barns or stacks and the bales then drawn to the 
point of delivery. This is the work of fall, winter, 
or spring, as the case may be. 

The laborious pastime of breaking colts is now 
in order and the younger ones are broken to the 
halter, the older to harness, often in the shafts 
of a primitive sleigh commonly known as a 
"jumper," each thill and runner of which is formed 
of one tough sapling cut halfway through, with a 
wide notch at the point where runner becomes 
thill. The boys may take a pull at the long halter 
of the stubborn youngster, but a stronger hand 
than theirs must give the two-year-old or three- 
year-old initiatory lessons in his life of labor. 

On Saturdays, when there is no school, the boys 
sometimes have a jolly time breaking a pair of 
steer calves. A miniature yoke couples the stubby- 
horned, pot-bellied little cattle together, and the 
boy's sled is their light burden. A runaway of the 
baby oxen is not unlikely to occur, but only adds 
to the fun of the affair. 



56 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

In such pursuits the day passes till foddering- 
time comes, when the sheep-racks are cleared of 
"orts" which are thrown outside the yard for 
Dobbin to glean from, and the sheep foddered 
afresh from the mow. The cows are stabled and 
fed. The clamor of the pigs ceases as their troughs 
are filled with swill. The horses are cared for, the 
night's wood carried in, and then with supper 
begins the long winter evening. 

The bustling hired girl clears the table and 
washes the dishes with tremendous clatter, gives 
the kitchen its last sweeping for the day, and then, 
if she has not dough to knead for the morrow's 
baking, makes herself tidy and settles herself com- 
fortably to her sewing. The goodwife knits or 
sews while she chats with her maid or listens to 
the items her goodman reads from the local paper; 
the youngsters puzzle with knitted brows over 
the sums of to-morrow's 'rithmetic lesson; the 
hired man munches apples and smokes his pipe 
while he toasts his stockinged feet at the great 
cook-stove, beneath which Tray and Tubby snore 
and purr in peaceful unison. 

Though every farmhouse now has its sitting- 
room and parlor, and most a dining-room, the 
kitchen continues to be a favorite with farming 
folk — a liking probably inherited from our grand- 
fathers. In many of their houses this was the only 
large room, in which the family lived, and where 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 57 

all meals were taken, guests entertained, and 
merry-makings held. At one end was the great 
fireplace wherein back-log and fore-stick burned, 
sending forth warmth and light, intense and bright 
over the broad hearth, but growing feebler to- 
ward the dim corners where Jack Frost lurked and 
grotesque shadows leaped and danced on the wall. 
On the crane, suspended by hook or trammel, 
hung the big samp-kettle, bubbling and seeth- 
ing. The open dresser shone with polished pewter 
mug and trencher. Old-fashioned, splint-bottomed 
chairs, rude but comfortable, sent their long shad- 
ows across the floor. 

The tall clock measured the moments with de- 
liberate tick. The big wheel and little, the one for 
wool, the other for flax; the poles overhead, with 
their garniture of winter crooknecks and festoons 
of dried apples; the long-barreled flintlock that 
had borne its part in Indian fight, at Bennington, 
and in many a wolf and bear hunt, hanging with 
powder-horn and bullet-pouch against the chim- 
ney — all these made up a homely interior far 
more picturesque than any to be found in mod- 
ern farmhouses. Those who remember old-time 
cookery aver that in these degenerate days there 
are no johnny-cakes so sweet as those our grand- 
mothers baked on a board on the hearth, no roast 
meats so juicy as those which slowly turned on 
spits before the open fire, nor any brown bread or 



58 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

baked beans to compare with those which the old 
brick ovens and bake-kettles gave forth. 

In those old kitchens that have partly with- 
stood the march of improvement, the great fire- 
place has fallen into disuse. Oftener it has been 
torn down, chimney, oven, and all, to make room, 
now deemed better than its company, and its 
place supplied by the more convenient cook-stove. 
The woodwork is painted, the smoke-stained 
whitewash is covered by figured wall-paper; and- 
irons, crane, pot-hook, and trammel have gone 
for old iron; the place of the open dresser is 
usurped by a prim closed cupboard; big and little 
wheel, relics of an almost lost and forgotten 
handicraft, have long since been banished to the 
garret. There, too, has gone the ancient clock, 
and a short, dapper timepiece, on whose lower 
half is a landscape of startling colors, hurries the 
hours away with swift loud tick. 

Everything has undergone some change; even 
the old gun has had its flintlock altered to per- 
cussion. 

Of all the rooms in our farmhouse, the kitchen 
chamber is probably the least changed. Its 
veined and blistered whitewashed ceiling, low 
sloping at the sides, still bumps unwary heads. 
The great trunk that held grandmother's bedding 
when she and grandfather, newly wedded, moved 
into this, then, wild country, and the sailor great- 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 59 

uncle's sea-chest, occupy their old corners. The 
little fireplace is unchanged and on the chimney 
above it hang, as of old, bundles and bags of bone- 
set, catnip, sage, summer savory, elder-root, slip- 
pery-elm, and no end of roots and herbs for sick 
men's tea and well men's seasoning. There are 
the same low beds with patchwork covers and by 
their side the small squares of rag carpet — little 
oases for naked feet in the chill desert of the bare 
floor; and the light comes in through the same 
little dormer-windows through which it came 
seventy years ago. To this dormitory the hired 
man betakes himself when his last pipe is smoked, 
and soon, in nasal trumpet-blasts, announces his 
arrival in the Land of Nod, to which by nine 
o'clock or so all the household have followed. 

Where do the birds, who brave with us the 
rigors of the New England winter, pass the chill 
nights, and where find harbor from the pitiless 
storms .^^ They are about the house, woodpile, out- 
buildings, and orchards all the clear cold days 
— downy, nuthatch and chickadee — searching 
every nook and cranny of the rough-barked locust 
and weather-beaten board and post for their 
scanty fare; and blue jay, busy with the frozen 
apples or the droppings of the granary. But when 
a roaring, raving storm comes down from the 
north they vanish. When we face it to go to the 
barn to fodder the stock, we do not find them 



60 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

sheltered there; nor at the morning foddering, 
climbing to the dusky mow, do we disturb them 
as toward spring or in its early days we do such 
poor song-birds, sparrows and robins, as have 
been fooled by a few warm days into a too early 
coming, to find themselves suddenly encompassed 
by such bitter weather as they fled from months 
ago. Doubtless the windless thickets of the woods 
and the snug hollows of old trees are the shelter of 
our little winter friends in such inclement seasons. 

One night in the week, it may be, the young 
folks all pack off in the big sleigh to the singing- 
school in the town-house, where they and some 
scores of others combine to murder psalmody and 
break the heart of their instructor. 

At these gatherings are flirtations and heart- 
burnings as well as at the "donation parties," 
which occur once or twice in the winter, when with 
kindly meant unkindness the poor minister's 
house is taken possession of by old and young, 
whose gifts too often but poorly compensate for 
the upturning and confusion they have made 
with their romping games. 

So winter drags its hoary length through dreary 
months, with silent snowfall, fierce storm, and 
dazzling sunshine. Mows dwindle and stacks dis- 
appear, leaving only the empty pens to mark their 
place, and cisterns fail, making the hauling of 
snow for melting an added task to the boys' 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 61 

duties. Bucksaw and axe are each day making 
shorter the long pile of cordwood and greater the 
pile of stove wood. 

The traditional "January thaw'* comes and sets 
all the brooks a-roaring and makes lakes of the 
flat meadows, while the south wind blows with a 
springlike softness and sighs itself asleep. The 
sky clears and the north wind awakes and out- 
roars the brooks till it locks them fast again and 
turns the flooded meadows to glittering ice-fields 
whereon the boys have jolly skating bouts in the 
moonlit evenings. 

Many another snowfall comes, perhaps, but 
every day the sunshine waxes warmer, and the 
snow melts slowly off the roofs and becomes 
"countersunk" about tree-trunks and mullein- 
stalks. The tips of weather-beaten grass appear 
above it and the great drifts grow dingy. It be- 
comes pleasant to linger for a while in shirt-sleeves 
on the sunny side of the barn, listening to the 
steady drip of the icicled eaves and the cackhng 
of hens, and watching the cattle lazily scratching 
themselves and chewing their cuds in the genial 
warmth. 

The first crow comes, and now, if never again 
in all the year, his harsh voice has a pleasant 
sound. Roads grow *' slumpy " and then so nearly 
bare that people begin to ponder whether they 
shall go forth on runners or wheels. 



62 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

Some early lambs enter upon their short life, 
and knock-kneed calves begin to make the old 
barn echo with their bawling and the clatter of 
their clumsy gambols. The gray woods take on 
the purple tinge of swelling buds. The brooks 
resume their merry music. The song-sparrows 
come, the bluebird's carol is heard, the first robin 
ventures to come exploring, and high overhead 
the wild geese are winging their northward way. 
Though Jack Frost strives every night to regain 
his sway and often for whole days maintains a 
foothold, his fortunes slowly wane and spring 
comes coyly but surely on. 

Her footsteps waken the woodchuck from his 
long sleep, and he comes to his door to look about 
him, with eyes unaccustomed to the sunlit day. 
In the plashy snow of the woods, the raccoon's 
track shows that he has wandered from den or 
hollow tree. Southern slopes, then broad fields, 
grow bare, till all the snow is gone from them but 
the soiled drifts in the hollows and along the 
fences; in the woods it still lies deep, but coarse- 
grained and watery. 

The blood of the maples is stirred, and in sugar- 
making regions the tapping of the trees is begun. 
A warm day following a freezing night sets all 
the spouts a-dripping merrily into the bright tin 
*'tubs," and once or twice a day the oxen and sled 
go winding through the woods, hauling a cask to 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 63 

which the sap is brought from the trees with 
buckets and neck-yoke, and then taken to the 
sugar-house. This is set, if possible, at the foot of 
some hillside or knoll, on which the sled may be 
driven so that its burden overtops the great hold- 
ers standing beside the boiling-pans within. Into 
these holders the sap is discharged through a pipe. 
Now the boiling begins, and the thin sap thickens 
to rich syrup as it seethes and bubbles in its slow 
course from the first pan to the last, while the 
woods about are filled with the sweet odor of its 
steam. 

Following up this scent, and the sounds of merry 
chatter, one may come upon a blithe "sugar 
party" of young folks, gathered in and about the 
sugar-house. In this earhest picnic of the season 
the sole refreshment is hot sugar poured on clean 
snow, where it cools to a gummy consistency 
known as "waxed" sugar. The duty of the rustic 
gallant is to whittle a little maple paddle (which 
is held to be the proper implement for sugar- 
eating) for his mistress, and to keep her allotted 
portion of the snowbank well supplied with the 
amber-hued sweet. 

In earlier days the sap, caught in rough wooden 
troughs, was boiled in a potash-kettle, suspended 
by a log-chain from the smaller end of a goodly 
sized tree trimmed of its branches and balanced 
across a stump. A few rudely piled stones formed 



64 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

the fireplace, whose chimney was the wide air, and 
every veering puff of wind would encloud the red- 
shirted sugar-maker in the smoke of his fire and 
the steam of his kettle. Kettle, fireplace, and pon- 
derous crane had no roofing but the overbranch- 
ing trees and the sky above them; the only shelter 
of the sugar-makers from rain and "sugar snows*' 
was a little shanty as rude as an Indian wigwam 
in construction and furniture. 

The woodpecker sounds his rattling drum-call; 
the partridge beats his muffled roll; flocks of 
blackbirds gurgle a liquid song, and the hyla tunes 
his shrill pipe, while advancing Spring keeps step 
to their music, more and more pervading all na- 
ture with her soft, mysterious presence. 

In the woods the snow has shrunk to the cold 
shelter of the ledges, and the arbutus begins to 
blossom half-unseen among its dull green and 
russet leaves, and liverwort flowers dot the sunny 
slopes with tufts of white, and pink, and blue. 

Sap-flow and sugar-making slacken, so that a 
neighbor finds time to visit another at his sugar- 
works, and asks, "Have you heard the frogs?" 
Only one "run" of sap after the frogs peep is the 
traditional rule. So the frogs having peeped, the 
last run comes and sugar-making ends. 

A wholesome fragrance is wafted to you on the 
damp wind, hke and yet unlike the earth-smell 
which precedes a shower — the subtile blending of 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 65 

the exhalations of sodden leaves and quickened 
earth, with the faint perfume of the shad trees, 
shining white with blossoms, as if snow-laden in 
the purple woods, and the willow catkins that 
gleam in swamps and along the brimming streams. 
It is a purely springhke odor. 

The fields of winter wheat and rye, if the snow 
has kindly covered them through the bitter 
weather, take on a fresher green, and the south- 
ern slopes of pasture-lands and the swales show 
tinges of it. 

The sower is pacing the fall-ploughed ground 
to and fro with measured tread, scattering the 
seed as he goes, and, after him, team and harrow 
scratch the mould. In favored places the ploughs 
are going, first streaking, then broadly patching, 
the somber fields with the rich hue of freshly 
turned sward. Then early potatoes are planted, 
gardens made, corn-ground made ready, and 
houses unbanked, letting dayhght into cellars 
once more. 

All day long the lamentations of bereaved cows 
are heard. "Settings" of milk begin to crowd the 
dairy, and churning, that plague of the boy, be- 
comes his constant alternate dread and suffering. 

As pastures grow green the sheep are "tagged" 
and released from their long confinement in shed 
and yard. With loud rejoicings they go rushing 
along the lane to the pasture, eager for the first 



66 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

nibble of the unforgotten herbage. Not many 
days later the cows are turned out, and the lush 
feed turns their pale butter to gold. 

Young lambs now claim the farmer's care. 
Each day he must visit the flock to see if some 
unnatural mother must not be forced to give suck 
to her forlorn yeanling, or if some, half dead with 
the cold of night or storm, need not be brought 
to the kitchen fire to be warmed to life. When 
a "lamb-killer" comes, as the cold storms are 
called which sometimes occur in May, his arms are 
likely enough to be filled with them before he has 
made the round of the pasture. Often an or- 
phaned or disowned lamb is brought up by hand, 
and the "cosset" becomes the pet of the children 
and the pest of the household. If Madame Rey- 
nard takes a fancy to spring lamb for the provi- 
sion of her household she makes sad havoc. Her 
depredations must be stopped some way, either by 
removing the flock to a safer pasture, or, if her 
burrow can be found, by digging out and destroy- 
ing her young, leaving her with no family to pro- 
vide for or by ending with her own life her free- 
booting career. To compass her taking-off, the 
farmer repairs with his gun, in the gray of the 
morning, to the woodside, from which he enters the 
field and, hiding behind a stump to leeward of her 
customary line of approach, awaits her coming. 
As, on evil deeds intent, she steals cautiously 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 67 

from the cover of the woods, her faded, ragged, 
whitey-yellow fur is in sorry contrast with the 
beauty of her dress when days were cold and cares 
were hght. The farmer imitates the squeak of a 
mouse. The sound, though shght, catches her ear 
at once, and she draws nearer and nearer the 
stump from which it proceeds, stopping fre- 
quently to listen, with cocked head, till, when 
within short range, she is cut down by a heavy 
charge. 

In his first days the Merino lamb is one of 
the homeliest of young things, pink-nosed, lean, 
wrinkled, and lop-eared, and stumbling about in 
uncertain fashion on its clumsy, sprawling legs. 
But a month or six weeks of life give him prettiness 
enough to make amends for the ugliness of his 
early infancy. There is no prettier sight to be seen 
on the farm than a party of them at play, toward 
the close of the day, running in a crowd at the top 
of their speed from one knoll to another, then 
frisking a moment in graceful gambols, and then 
scampering back again, while the staid matrons of 
the flock look on in apparent wonder at their antic 
sport. 

When the ditches are dark green with young 
marsh marigolds, "good for greens," it is a pleas- 
ant outing on a warm day, for goodwife and chil- 
dren to go picking "cowslips," as they are sure to 
call them. 



68 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

A thousand banished birds have come to their 
own again. The creak and twitter of the well-be- 
loved swallows echo through the half-empty barn. 
Robins and phoebes have built their nests; the 
advance guard of bobolinks are rollicking in the 
meadows where the meadowlark pertly walks, 
his conspicuous yellow and black breast belying 
his long-drawn "can't-see-me." Orioles flash 
among the elm branches where they are weaving 
their pensile nests. The purple linnet showers his 
song from the tree-top, and far and clear from the 
upland pasture comes the waiHng cry of the plover. 
Chickadee has gone to make his summer home in 
woods whose purple gray is sprinkled now with 
golden green, and where bath-flowers are bloom- 
ing and tender shoots are pushing up through the 
matted leaves of last year. 

The hickory has given the sign for corn-plant- 
ing, for its leaves are as large as a squirrel's ear 
(some say, a squirrel's foot). This important labor 
having been performed, the grotesque scarecrow 
is set at his post, or glittering tins, or twine fes- 
tooned from stake to stake, do duty in his stead. 

Now there comes a little lull in work betwixt 
planting and hoeing during which boys and hired 
men assert their right, established by ancient 
usage, to take a day to go a-fishing. Those whose 
country is blessed with such streams of liquid 
crystal steal with careful steps along some trout- 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 69 

brook whose braided current washes mossy, root- 
woven banks, in old woods, gurghng over pebbly- 
beds and plashing down lichened rocks into pools 
where the wary trout lurks under the foam bells, or 
slips through alder copses into meadows where it 
winds almost hidden by the rank grass that over- 
hangs its narrow course. 

Our rustic angler uses no nice skill in playing 
or landing his fish, but having him well hooked 
jerks him forth by main strength of arm and 
clumsy pole and line, with a force that sends him, 
whether he be perch or bull-pout, or, by lucky 
chance, pike-perch or bass, in a curving flight high 
overhead, and walloping with a resounding thud 
on the grass far behind his captor. 

Perhaps all hands go to the nearest seining- 
ground, and, buying a haul, stand an eager group 
on the sandy beach, joking feebly while they nerv- 
ously wait and watch the ripphng curve of floats 
as the net comes sweeping slowly in, bringing, 
maybe, for their half-dollar, only a few worthless 
clams and sunfish, or, if fortune favors, maybe a 
floundering crowd of big fish, which, strung on a 
tough twig, they carry home rejoicing. 

The housewife's fowls are conspicuous objects 
now about the farmhouse — the anxious, fussy 
hens, full of soKcitude for their broods, some, well 
grown, straying widely from the coop in adven- 
turous explorations or in awkward pursuit of in- 



70 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

sects; some, little balls of down, keeping near the 
home threshold and mindful of the maternal call, 
while Chanticleer saunters proudly among his 
wives and children with no care but to keep an 
eye out for those swooping pirates, the hawks. 
The ducks waddle away in Indian file to the pond 
which they share with the geese; and the turkeys, 
silliest of fowls, wander far and wide, an easy prey 
to fox or hawk. 

Night and morning a persuasive call, "Boss! 
boss! boss!" invites the calves — those soft-eyed, 
sleek-coated, beautiful idiots — to the feeding 
stanchion in the corner of their paddock, where 
they receive their rations of "skim" milk and 
then solace themselves with each other's ears for 
the lost maternal udders. 

In the placid faces of their mothers, as they 
come swinging homeward from the pasture, there 
is no sign of bereavement nor of its lightest 
recollection. Happy beasts whose pangs of sorrow 
kindly Nature so quickly heals ! 

In the last of the blossom-freighted days of 
May is one that each year grows dearer to us. 
There is scarcely a graveyard among our hills but 
has its httle flag, guarding, in sun and shower, the 
grave of some soldier. Hither come farmers and 
villagers with evergreens and flow^ers, no one so 
thoughtless that he does not bring a spray of plum- 
blossoms or cluster of lilacs, no child so poor that 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 71 

it does not bear bunches of violets and dandelions, 
while the mothers rob the cherished house plants 
of their bloom and girls bring all the flowers of the 
wood. 

Far more touching than the long processions 
that with music and flags and floral chariot wind 
through the great cemeteries of our cities, are the 
simple rites of the small scattered groups of coun- 
try folks who come to deck with humble flowers 
the resting-place of the soldier who was neighbor 
or brother or comrade. While the garlands yet are 
fresh and fragrant on the graves, Spring blossoms 
into the perfect days of June. 

He who now braves the onslaughts of the 
bloodthirsty mosquito, in the leafy fastnesses of 
the June woods, will see, not so many birds as he 
may expect to, judging from the throngs in fields 
and orchards, but many of those he does see will 
be unknown to him if he has not the lore of the 
ornithologist and a sharp eye and ear to boot. 
However, he will meet old acquaintances, his little 
friends the chickadees and the nuthatches, the 
commoner woodpeckers and the yellow-bellied, 
perhaps. The jays will scold him and the crows 
make a pother overhead if he chances in the 
neighborhood of their nests, and, likely enough, 
he will see fluttering and skulking before him a 
brown something — is it beast or bird? — and 
some nimble balls of brown and yellow down dis- 



72 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

appearing under the green leaves of this year or 
the dead ones of last, at his very feet, which, after 
the first moment of surprise, he knows are a hen- 
partridge and her young. Tracing an unmistak- 
able half -harsh note to a tree-top he sees the red- 
hot glow of a scarlet tanager and knows that his 
dull green mate is not far off. 

Led by the sound of axe-strokes, falling quicker 
and not so strongly as those of the wood-chopper, 
he breasts the tangle of broad-leafed hobble-bush 
and the clustered bloom of cornels and comes upon 
a man busy with axe and spade peeling the hem- 
lock logs cut last winter; some shining in the 
"chopping" in the whiteness of their fresh naked- 
ness, their ancient vestments set up against them 
to dry; others, still clad in the furrowed bark, 
drilled by the beaks of a thousand woodpeckers and 
scratched by the claws of numberless generations 
of squirrels. It is one of Nature's mysteries that 
these prostrate trunks should feel the thrill of her 
renewed life and their sap flow again for a Uttle 
while through the severed ducts. If the hand that 
now strips them were the same that hewed them 
down, one might believe the blood of these dead 
trees started afresh at the touch of their mur- 
derer. 

During the "breathing spell" which comes be- 
tween the finishing of spring's and the beginning 
of summer's work on the farm, the path-master 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 73 

warns out the farmers to the performance of the 
farce termed, by stretch of courtesy, "road-mend- 
ing," which is played regularly twice a year, when 
all hands turn out with teams, ploughs, scrapers 
and wagons, spades, shovels, and hoes and make 
good roads bad and bad roads worse. It is fortu- 
nate for those who travel much upon the highways 
that these road-menders do so little, playing at 
work for a short time, then stopping, leaning on 
plough-handle or spade to hold grave consultation 
concerning the ways of doing some part of their 
task, or gathering about the water-jug in the 
shade of a wayside tree, and spending an uncon- 
scionable time in quenching their thirst and light- 
ing their pipes and joking or discussing some mat- 
ter of neighborhood gossip. 

But the young corn is showing in rows of green 
across the dark mould that the time for the first 
hoeing has come. The long-suffering boy be- 
strides old Dobbin and guides him between the 
rows while he drags back and forth the plough or 
cultivator, held, most likely, by one too apt to 
blame the boy for every misstep of the horse which 
crushes beyond resurrection a hill of corn. It is 
my opinion that to this first odious compulsory 
equitation entailed upon the boys of my genera- 
tion is due the falling into disuse of equestrianism 
in New England. Who that had ever ridden a 
horse at snail's pace among the corn-rows in the 



' 74 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

lazy days of early summer when he knew he ought 
to be catching the fish or hunting the birds' nests 
he was dreaming of, instead of being a clothespin 
to the thin blanket on Dobbin's sharp back and 
the mark of the sharper tongue of the plough- 
holder, would ever again of his own free will 
mount a horse? I can speak for one. Happily this 
particular boy -torture has gone out of fashion; 
and in the tillage of hoed crops as in haymaking 
the horse is guided by the man who cultivates or 
rakes. After this trio, man, boy, and horse, come 
the hoers cutting away at the everlasting and 
ever-present weeds, and stirring and mellowing 
the soil of the corn or potato hills. 

It is likely enough to happen, about these days, 
that a farmer, having set about the building of a 
barn and the carpenter having got the frame 
ready for setting up, invites his neighbors to a 
"raising," one of the few "bees" remaining of 
those so common and frequent in the earlier days 
of interdependence. The young and able-bodied 
are promptly on hand, and vie with one another 
in deeds of strength and daring, while the old 
men, exempt from the warfare of life, sit apart 
on a pile of rafters or sleepers, anon giving sage 
advice, recounting their youthful exploits, and 
contrasting the past with the present; seldom, 
albeit, to the great honor of modern times or men. 
The labor ended, cakes, pies, cheese, and cider are 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 75 

served, and these comfortably disposed of, the 
jolly company disperse. 

One kind of "bee,*' as these gatherings for mu- 
tual help are called, which has only lately gone 
out with the oxen, who were the chief actors in it, 
was the ''drawing bee." A farmer, having cause 
to change the site of a barn or other structure, 
would, with the carpenter's help, usually in early 
spring, but sometimes in the fall, get runners un- 
der his building. These were long timbers of some- 
thing more than the building's length, cut with 
an upward slope at the forward end. Having 
properly braced the inside of his barn, to with- 
stand the rack of transportation, all his oxen- 
owning neighbors were bidden to his aid. The 
yokes of oxen were hitched in two "strings," one 
to each runner, and, all being ready, were started 
off at the word of command, amid a clamor of 
"Whoa-hush!" "Whoa-haw!" and "Gee!" ad- 
dressed to the Bucks, Broads, Stars, Brindles, and 
Brights, who were the motive power, the creaking 
of the racked frame and the shrill shouts of the 
boys, without whose presence nothing of such 
moment ever is, if it ever could be, done. 

The barn being safely set in its new place, the 
bee ended in feasting and jollification. Now that 
oxen have become so scarce it would need the 
mustering of a whole county to provide the nec- 
essary force. In the old times there were also 



76 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

"logging bees," and others, which have fallen 
into disuse. 

After hoeing, the deluge — for the sheep ; for 
they must be washed preparatory to shearing, 
which important event in their and farm life now 
draws near. In some pool of a stream, or sheltered 
cove of a pond or lake, where the water is hip- 
deep, or under the outpouring stream from a 
tapped mill-flume, or the farmer's own pond made 
for this especial purpose, they suffer this cleansing. 

Huddled in a pen they are taken by the catcher 
as called for and carried to the washers, and, 
passing from their hands, stagger, water-logged 
and woe-begone, up the bank to rejoin their drip- 
ping comrades, and doubtless pass the hours while 
their fleeces are drying in mutual condolement 
over man's inhumanity to sheep. 

Within a fortnight or so after this comes the 
shearing. The farmer engages the service of as 
many as he needs of his neighbors and their sons 
as are skillful shearers. The barn floor and its 
overhanging scaffolds are carefully swept. The 
skies are watched for the day and night preceding 
the first day of shearing, lest a sudden shower 
should wet the sheep, which, if so threatened, must 
be got to the shelter of the barn. If this fore- 
thought has not been needed in the early morning 
of the great day, all the available force is mus- 
tered, such farmhands as can be spared from the 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 77 

milking, the boys roused from their morning nap, 
and some helpful, timely coming shearers, to get 
the sheep home from the pastures. Them the sun 
salutes with his first rays as they encompass the 
sheep on the dry knoll where they have slept, and 
call and drive them homeward across the pasture 
and through the lane to the barnyard. 

Who shall tell the waywardness of sheep ! How 
they will come to one when not called or wanted, 
but will flee from the caller when wanted as if he 
were a ravening wolf; how they will peer suspi- 
ciously at the gap or gateway through which they 
should go, as if on the thither side were lurking 
dire perils; or how they will utterly ignore it and 
race past it at headlong speed, unheeding the 
shaking of salt-dish and the most persuasive 
"ca-day," and how surely they will discover the 
smallest break in a fence through which they 
should not go, and go scrambling through it, or 
over a wall, pell-mell, like a charging squadron of 
horse, as, if not possessed with the devil himself, 
possessed, at least, with the fear that he, or some- 
thing more terrible than he to ovine imagination, 
will surely take the hindmost. But the patience 
with which they endure shearing is a virtue which 
covers many of their sins. Seldom struggling 
much, though they are held continually in un- 
natural positions, on the side with the neck under 
the shearer's knee, or on the rump with the neck 



78 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

bent over his knee or pilloried between his legs. 
Surely the sheep was made to be shorn. Fancy 
any other domestic animal undergoing the process. 
What comes of pig-shearing is proverbial. 

From the barn, so silent since foddering ended, 
issues now a medley of sounds — the loud bleat- 
ing of the ewes, in tones as various as human 
voices, and the higher-pitched lamentations of the 
lambs, bewailing their short separation, the cas- 
tanet-like click of the shears, loud jests and merry 
laughter, the outcry of the alarmed swallows 
cleaving the upper darkness of the ridge, where 
within feather-lined mud walls their treasures lie. 

Ranged along the floor, each in his allotted 
place, are the three, four, or half-dozen or more 
shearers, bending each over his sheep, which, 
under his skillful hand, shrinks rapidly from um- 
ber plumpness to creamy-white thinness, under- 
going a change so great that, when released, she 
goes leaping forth into the yard, her own lamb 
hardly knows her. At his table, with a great reel of 
twine at his elbow, is the tier, making each fleece 
into a compact bundle. At the stable-door is the 
alert catcher, ready with an unshorn sheep as each 
shorn one is let go; and these, with a boy to pick 
up scattered locks, constitute the working force. 

Neighbors drop in to lounge an hour away in 
the jolly company, to take a pull at the cider 
pitcher, or engage shearers for their own shearing. 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 79 

The wool buyer makes his rounds, and the boys 
come to see the shearing, to get in everybody's 
way, and beg cuts of sheep-twine. The farmhouse 
affords its best for the shearing dinner, which has 
long been an honored festival in New England. 

But the cheap wool-growing of the great West 
has well-nigh put an end to this industry here. 
Flocks have become few and small, and herds 
of Alderneys or shorthorns feed where formerly 
great flocks of Merinos nibbled the clover. Shep- 
herds have turned dairymen. Those who practice 
the shearers* craft year by year become scarcer, 
and the day seems not far off when this once great 
event of our year will live only in the memory of 
old men. 

The silvery green of the rye-fields, and the 
darker green of the winter wheat, and the purple 
bloom of the herds' grass, grow billowy under the 
soft winds of July with waves that bear presage 
of harvesting and haymaking. 

In fields red and white with clover and daisy, 
the strawberries have ripened, and have drawn a 
flavor, the essence of wildness, from the free 
clouds that shadowed them, from the songs of the 
bobolinks and meadowlarks that hovered over 
them, from bumble-bee and skimming swallow, 
from the near presence of the nightly prowling 
fox — a flavor that no garden fruit possesses. To 
pick these is not so much a labor as a pastime for 



80 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

the women and children who go out to gather 
them under such blue skies and amid such bloom 
of clover, daisy, and buttercup, and sung to so 
cheerily by the jolly bobolink. 

About the Fourth of July haying begins. The 
rank growth about the barns is hand-mowed, and 
the mowing-machine is trundled out from its rust- 
ing idleness, and, being tinkered into readiness, 
goes jingling and clattering afield, where, having 
fairly got at its work, it gnaws down with untiring 
tooth its eight or ten acres a day. The incessant 
unmodulated "chirr" of this modern innovator 
has almost banished the ancient music of the 
whetted scythe, a sound that for centuries had 
been as much a part of haymaking as the fra- 
grance of the newmown hay. But its musical voice 
cannot save it. The old scythe must go, and we 
cannot deny that the noisy usurper is a blessing to 
us all in lightening labor, and, not least among us, 
to the boy, for whom I cherish a kindly feeling, 
and for any softening of whose lot I am thankful. 

In the days before mowing-machines, hordes of 
Canadian French swarmed over the borders to 
work in haying, in crews of two or three, jiggling 
southward in their rude carts, drawn by tough, 
shaggy little ponies. They were doughty work- 
men in the field and at the table; merry -hearted 
and honest fellows, too; for, when they departed, 
they seldom took, beside their wages, more than 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 81 

a farming tool or two, or the sheets from their 
beds, doubtless as mementoes of their sojourn in 
the States. But the Batistes and Antoines and 
innumerable Joes and Pierres bide on their own 
arpents now all the summer through and come to 
us no more. If we miss them, with their baggy 
trousers and gay sashes, the shuffle of their moc- 
casined feet and their sonorous songs that had 
always a touch of pathos in them, we do not 
mourn for them. 

As the cut grass dries under the downright 
beams of the summer sun and becomes ready for 
the raking, the windrows (always "winrows," 
here) lengthen along the shaven sward as the 
horse-rake goes back and forth across the meadow, 
and the workmen following with forks soon dot 
the fields with cocks if the hay is to wait to-mor- 
row's drawing, or with less careful tumbles if it 
goes to barn or stack to-day. 

Now the wagon comes surmounted by its rat- 
thng " hay-riggin'," with the legs of the pitcher 
and the unfortunate who "mows away" and 
*' rakes after" dangling over its side, and the man 
who loads, the captain, pilot, and stevedore of this 
craft, standing forward driving his horses, for the 
oxen and cart, too slow for these hurrying times, 
have lumbered into the past. The stalwart pitcher 
upheaves the great forkfuls, skillfully bestowed 
by the loader, till they have grown into a load 



82 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

which moves off with ponderous stateliness across 
the meadow to the stack or barn. Seen from astern 
as it sways and heaves along its way, one might 
fancy it an enormous elephant with a Yankee 
mahout on its back. 

In the middle of the long afternoon is luncheon- 
time, when all hands gather in the shade of tree 
or stack or barn and fortify themselves with 
gingerbread and cheese. Showers interrupt, fore- 
shadowed by pearly mountains of "thunder- 
heads " that uplift themselves above the more ma- 
terial mountains of earth which are soon veiled 
with the blue-black film of the coming rain, when 
there is bustle in the hay-field, rapid making of 
cocks that are no sooner made than blown over by 
the rain-gust, and drivers shouting to their teams 
hurrying to shelter with their loads. And days 
arrive when from morning till night the rain comes 
steadily down, stopping all outdoor work. Then 
some go a-fishing or to lounge in the village store, 
or perhaps all gather in the barn to chat and joke 
and doze away the dull hours on the fragrant 
hay. Some harvesting intervenes and the cradles 
swing in the fields of rye and wheat with graceful 
sweep and musical ring. The binders follow and 
soon the yellow shocks are ranked along the field 
whence they go duly to the barn. 

When the night-hawk circles through the eve- 
ning sky, now uttering his harsh note, anon plung- 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 83 

ing downward with a sound like the twanging of 
the bass strings of some great instrument, and 
the August piper begins his shrill, monotonous 
concert, and the long shadows crawl eastward 
across the meadows where the rusty-breasted 
robins are hopping in quest of supper, the toilworn 
farmer looks forth upon his shaven sward with its 
shapely stacks all ridered and penned, and upon 
the yellow stubble of his shorn grain-fields, and is 
glad that the fret and labor of haying and harvest- 
ing are over. 

Soon the nights have a threat of frost in their 
increasing chilliness; birds have done singing and 
there is the mournfulness of speedy departure in 
their short, business-like notes. The foam of the 
buckwheat-fields, upborne on stems of crimson and 
gold, is flecked with pale green and brown kernels, 
inviting the cradler. The blond tresses of the corn 
are grown dark; the yellow kernels begin to show 
through the parted husks and the cutting of this 
most beautiful of grains begins. The small forest 
of maize becomes an Indian village whose wig- 
wams are corn-shocks, in whose streets lie yellow 
pumpkins with their dark vines trailing among 
the pigeon-grass and weeds. The pumpkin. New 
England's well-beloved and the golden crown of 
her Thanksgiving feast, might be her symbolic 
plant, as Old England's rose and Scotland's 
thistle are theirs. How the adventurous vine. 



84 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

rough, prickly, and somewhat coarse, even in its 
flowers, wanders forth from its parent hill, through 
bordering wilderness of aftermath and over Rocky 
Mountains of walls, overcoming all and bearing 
golden fruit afar off, yet always holding on to the 
old home, Yankee-hke, and drawing its sap and 
life therefrom! 

Whether or not the frost has come to blacken 
the leaves of the pumpkins, squashes, and cucum- 
bers and to hasten the ripening of the foliage, the 
trees are taking on the autumnal colors. The ash 
shows the first grape-bloom of its later purple, the 
butternut is blotched with yellow, and the leaves 
of the hickory are turning to gold; and though the 
greenness of the oaks and some of the sugar- 
maples and elms still endures, the sumacs along 
the walls and the water-maples and pepperidges 
in the lowlands are red with the consuming fires of 
autumn. The yellow flame of the goldenrods has 
burned out and the paler lamps of the asters are 
Hghted along the fences and woodsides. 

The apples are growing too heavy to hold longer 
to the parent branch, and, with no warning but the 
click of intercepting leaves, tumble, perhaps, on 
the head of some unprofitable dreamer even in 
practical New England. They are ready for gath- 
ering, and the Greenings, Northern Spies, Spitz- 
enbergs, Russets, Pomeroys, and Tallman Sweets, 
and all whose virtues or pretensions have gained 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 85 

them a name, are plucked with the care befitting 
their honored rank and stored for winter use or 
market, while their plebeian kindred, the "com- 
mon" or "natural'* apples, are unceremoniously 
beaten with poles or shaken from their scraggy, 
untrimmed boughs and tumbled into the box of the 
farm-wagon to go lumbering off to the cider-mill. 
This, after its ten or eleven months of musty emp- 
tiness and idleness, has now awakened to a short 
season of bustle, of grinding and pressing and full- 
ness of casks and heaped bins and the fragrance 
thereof. Wagons are unloading their freight of 
apples and empty barrels, and departing with full 
casks after the driver has tested the flavor and 
strength of the earliest-made cider. And now at 
the cellar hatchway of the farmhouse, the boy 
and the new-come cider-barrel may be found in 
conjunction with a rye straw for the connecting 
link. 

The travehng thresher begins to make the round 
of the farms and establishes his machine on the 
barn floor, whence belch forth, with resounding 
din, clouds of dust in which are seen dimly the 
forms of the workmen and the laboring horses 
climbing an unstable hill whose top they never 
reach. Out of the dust-cloud grows a stack of yel- 
low straw alongside the gray barn, which it almost 
rivals in height and breadth when the threshing 
is ended. 



86 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

About apple-picking time, and for a month or 
two after, "apple cuts" or "paring bees" used to 
be frequent, when all the young folks of a neighbor- 
hood were invited, never slighting the skilled 
parer with his machine. After some bushels of 
apples were pared, quartered, cored, and strung 
for drying, the kitchen was cleared of its rubbish 
of cores and skins, and after a feast of "nut- 
cakes," pumpkin pies, and cider, the plays began 
to the tunes of "Come, Philander, le's be march- 
in'," "The needle's eye that doth supply the 
thread that runs so true," and "We're marchin' 
onwards towards Quebec where the drums are 
loud/2/ beatin'," or the fiddle or "'Lisha's" song 
of "Tol-hddle, tol-Hddle, tol-lo-day, do-day-hum, 
do-day -hum, tolli-day," set all feet to jigging 
"Twin Sisters," or "French four." These jolly 
gatherings, though by many years outliving the 
old-fashioned husking bee, have at last fallen into 
disuse, and their hearty New England flavor is 
poorly supplied by the insipid sociables and 
abominable surprise parties that are now in 
vogue. 

The husking bees, in which girls took a part, 
when a red ear was a coveted treasure, are remem- 
bered only by the old; but the rollicking parties 
of men that gathered to husk in the fields by 
moonlight or firelight, or by lantern-light in the 
barns that rang again with their songs and noisy 



DANVIS FARM LIFE 87 

mirth, held a notable place in our farm life till 
within a decade or two of years. But they, too, 
have passed away, and husking has grown to be 
a humdrum, workday labor, though not an un- 
pleasant one, whether the spikes of gold are un- 
sheathed in the field in the hazy warmth of an 
October day, or in the barn when the fall rain is 
pattering on the roof and making brown puddles 
in the barnyard. In these days the cows are apt 
to come late to the milking, for the cow-boy loiters 
by the way to fill his pocket with hickory-nuts, or 
crack a hatful of butternuts on the big stone, 
which, with some small ones for hammers, seem 
always to be set under every butternut-tree. 

The turkeys wander far and wide grasshopper- 
hunting over the meadows, whereon the gossamer 
Hes so thick that the afternoon sun casts a shim- 
mering sunglade across them, and go nutting 
along the edge of the woods where the slender 
fingers of the beeches are dropping their Hght 
burden of golden leaves and brown mast. 

Long, straggHng columns of crows are moving 
southward by leisurely aerial marches, and at 
night and morning the clamor of their noisy en- 
campments disturbs the woods. Most of the 
summer birds have gone. A few robins, hopping 
silently among the tangle of wild grapevines, and 
flocks of yellowbirds, clad now in sober garments 
and uttering melancholy notes as they glean the 



88 DANVIS FARM LIFE 

seeds of the frostbitten hemp, are almost the only 
ones left. There are no songs of birds now, nor 
any flowers but here and there in the pastures an 
untimely blooming dandelion, and in the almost 
leafless woods the pink blossoms of herb Robert 
and the pale yellow flowers of the witch-hazel. 

The last potato is dug and stored, the buck- 
wheat drawn and threshed, the last pumpkin 
housed, and the cattle have begun to receive their 
daily allowance of corn-fodder. People begin to 
feel a pride in the increasing cold, and compare 
weather notes and speculate and prophesy con- 
cerning the coming of winter. The old farmhouse 
is made ready for winter. Its foundations are 
again reinforced with banking, its outside win- 
dows and storm-doors are set on their long guard 
of the winter weather, and all the sons and daugh- 
ters of the old house have gathered from far and 
near to hold the New England (now the national) 
feast of Thanksgiving, and have dispersed. The 
last wedge of wild geese has cloven the cold sky. 
There is a wintry roar in the wind-swept hills, and 
as the first snowflakes and the last sere leaves 
come eddying down together our year of farm life 
ends. 



SOBAPSQUA 

From the Vermont mainland in the township of 
Charlotte, a long cape, toothed with minor points 
and indented with small bays, reaches far west- 
ward toward the bald promontory of Split Rock. 
The cape is fringed with woods, and terminates in 
a bold cliff, crowned with cedars, pines, and de- 
ciduous trees. 

In it is embalmed the name of a man otherwise 
forgotten. No one knows who Thompson was, but 
it is probable that he was the first settler here, and 
that a scraggy orchard, intergrown with cedars, 
and the barely traceable foundations of a house, 
were his, and that some crumbling lines of stone 
wall mark the divisions of his sterile fields. 

Doubtless the poverty of this soil prevented a 
succession of occupants and the consequent suc- 
cession of names which so many of our points and 
bays have undergone. "Thompson's Point" is 
not a good name for a noble headland, but it is 
better that it should have borne it for a hundred 
years than half a dozen that are no more signifi- 
cant. 

The Waubanakees called it "Kozoapsqua," the 
"Long Rocky Point," and the noticeable cleft 
promontory opposite *' Sobapsqua," the "Pass 



90 SOBAPSQUA 

through the Rock," names which might well have 
been retained, and perhaps would have been if our 
pioneer ancestors had not so bitterly hated the 
Indians and all that pertained to them. There was 
cause enough for this hatred, but one wishes it had 
not been carried so far when the poverty of our 
ancestors' nomenclature is considered and the few 
surviving names of Indian origin remind us how 
easily we might have been spared the iteration 
of commonplace and vulgar names that cling to 
mountain, river, and lake. 

Sobapsqua and Kozoapsqua make the gateway 
to the broader expanse of water stretching thence 
to Canada. It is one through which many mem- 
orable expeditions have passed — unrecorded war 
parties of Iroquois and Waubanakee, the brave 
and devout Champlain on his voyage of discovery 
with his Indian allies, the predatory bands of 
French and Indians marching over the ice-bound 
lake, the armies of France bearing her banners to 
victory or trailing them homeward from defeat. 
Here passed Rogers and his rangers to wreak 
vengeance on those scourges of New England, the 
Waubanakees of Saint Francis, and then Am- 
herst's army passing from lesser conquests to the 
final and crowning victory. A few years later the 
little army of Americans went through these por- 
tals to its disastrous campaign in Canada, and 
the ensuing winter saw Warner and his rangers 



SOBAPSQUA 91 

march down the frozen lake to the succor of their 
hard-pressed brethren; the following summer, the 
same brave commander bearing homeward the 
feeble remnant of the Northern army. 

Here Arnold's flotilla passed on its way to the 
bloody battle at Valcour, and here the escaping 
vessels were overtaken by Carleton's fleet and the 
running fight began which ended at Arnold's Bay. 
Through this broad gateway came Burgoyne's un- 
returning host. Ticonderoga fell, and henceforth 
till the close of the war British warships passed 
and repassed in undisputed possession of the lake 
whose waters mirrored no flag but the red cross 
of England. Then it vanished from them till it 
reappeared when Captain Pring's flotilla made its 
unsuccessful assault on Fort Cassin, at the mouth 
of the Otter, in which McDonough's unready fleet 
lay moored. Next day the Stars and Stripes 
flashed past these headlands as the gallant fleet 
sailed down the lake to its eventual glorious vic- 
tory in Plattsburg Bay. 

Thus, for two centuries, such shifting scenes of 
war passed in broken succession before these stead- 
fast sentinels. Then came the peaceful sails of 
commerce, white-winged schooners and sloops, the 
single square canvas of Canadian craft; immense 
lumber rafts, coaxed slowly northward by sweep 
and sail; the first clumsy steamboat, making 
tortoise-like progress, followed in a little while 



92 SOBAPSQUA 

by majestic successors, tearing the still waters 
asunder and casting the torn waves against either 
rocky shore. 

In the later, pleasant days of autumn canoes of 
the Waubanakees reappeared, like apparitions of 
the old days, rounding the ancient headland, and 
making into the great *'Bay of the Vessels" 
straight for Wonakakatukese, Sungahneetuk or 
Paumbowk, the old trapping-grounds of the wild 
fathers of these peaceable men, coming now with 
no bloodier intent than warfare against the musk- 
rats, while their women made baskets and moc- 
casins to hawk about the countryside. The oldest 
men could repeat the legends of ancient wars 
with the Iroquois and knew the old names of 
rivers, mountains, and lakes, and still made offer- 
ing to Wojahose, the invisible deity of the lake, as 
they paddled in awed silence past the lonely rock 
wherein dwelt the master of storms. 

Fifty years ago some one discovered that the 
reefs off Thompson's Point were good fishing- 
grounds for pike-perch, and they became a favorite 
resort of anglers. To take advantage of the late 
and early fishing it was a common custom to camp 
on the Point overnight. For the most part the 
fishermen camped in primitive fashion. They 
slept on beds of cedar twigs under rude shelters of 
cedar boughs and cooked their simple fare, with 
few utensils, over an open fire. Occasionally a 



SOBAPSQUA 93 

party brought a tent and lived more luxuriously 
under canvas during a longer outing. At last a 
goodly guild of honest anglers built an unpreten- 
tious but comfortable clubhouse with two rooms 
on the ground floor, one of which was kitchen, 
dining-room, and living-room, the other a sleeping- 
apartment fitted up with two tiers of bunks, which 
were supplemented by others in the loft. There 
were a cook-stove, a big coffee-pot, kettles, and 
more than one capacious frying-pan, also a table 
and seats, but the primitive character of a genuine 
camp was still maintained. Everything was con- 
ducted in a free-and-easy manner, without any 
attempt at style or luxurious living. 

To supply the demands of the frying-pans and 
for sport, which, though dull as watching a runway 
for deer, quite satisfied their modest desires, these 
men anchored their boats on the reefs and fished 
from daybreak to nightfall with the philosophical 
patience of honest anglers. When the fish were 
biting well there was lively work hauling in the 
sixty or one hundred feet of line hand over hand, 
with a stout pike-perch and a strong current to 
fight against, but when there was a long time be- 
tween bites it was dull enough. A stiff cedar pole 
with wire guides and a cleat at the butt to wind 
the line on was the approved tackle by which the 
fish was brought to boat in the briefest possible 
time. 



94 SOBAPSQUA 

If the fishing was not conducted in the finest 
style of the art it fulfilled all the requirements 
of these anglers, and there were jolly gatherings 
around the camp-fire, whether it blazed in the free 
air or roared within the rusty iron walls of the stove. 

In those days the Point afforded good fox- 
hunting, as in days long before when Uncle Bill 
Williams and the old Meaches hunted there 
with their gaunt, melodious-voiced, old-fashioned 
hounds and were succeeded by Uncle Bill's sons, 
John Thorpe, and others of a generation of Nim- 
rods, who, in turn, have departed to happier 
hunting-grounds than these are now. 

We who came later had excellent sport, for at 
least one litter of foxes was sure to be raised there 
every year, and besides these residents transient 
visitors were likely enough to be started. 

A fox running before hounds would keep a 
course conforming to the shore-line and thus make 
the circuit of the Point, crossing from one side to 
the other near the heads of the two bays, and 
would so repeat the circuit till killed, run to earth, 
or run off the Point along one or the other shore to 
the Cove Woods, McNiell's Point, or the hills. 
A single hunter stood a reasonable chance of get- 
ting a shot, while if there were two or more, prop- 
erly posted, one of these was almost sure of a 
chance, though by no means so certain of the fox, 
who sometimes safely ran the gantlet of half a 



SOBAPSQUA 95 

dozen guns and left as many chopfallen hunters, 
each excusing himself and blaming the others. 

I have painful recollections of being more than 
once a member of such an awkward squad, mingled 
with pleasanter memories of occasions when for- 
tune favored us; but somehow the misadventures 
stand forth most prominently. I well remember 
one dull-skied November day when I tramped to 
the Point with no companion but my old hound 
Gabriel, and ranged the woods almost to the end 
without finding a track till he came to the old 
orchard, I being a little behind him, when he 
sounded such a melodious blast of his trumpet as 
at once raised my waning hopes and set me all 
alert. In a moment he had a fox afoot and going 
around the end of the Point from the south side to 
the north at a lively rate. There was a bare chance 
of my getting over to that side in time to intercept 
him, and I tried my best for it, running ventre a 
terre beside an old wall that crossed the pasture 
till I came to the belt of woods above the shore. I 
had not time to catch breath before the fox was 
seen among the thick shadows of the trees, in 
black relief against the light beyond, and I made a 
snap shot at him. He tumbled all in a heap into a 
clump of cedar-trunks, but before I could get to 
him he picked himself up and staggered into a 
thicket, whither 1 followed close at his heels mak- 
ing futile snatches at his brush, a foot or so beyond 



96 SOBAPSQUA 

my reach. Having the advantage of slipping 
through intricacies that I floundered against, he 
was gaining on me a httle, when Gabriel over- 
hauled us and pounced upon him with a grip that 
took the life out of the poor fox, yet not soon 
enough to prevent one vengeful nip in the nose of 
his slayer. Gabriel's angelic name came of his 
voice, not of his temper, which was so kindled by 
this last thrust of his foe that the handsome skin 
was in danger of being spoiled before I could get 
the fox away from him. When I began taking off 
the pelt he curled himself up for a comfortable nap, 
but a fresh twinge of his wounded nose suddenly 
rekindled his smouldering wrath, and snatching 
the fox out of my hands he gave it another violent 
shaking, and I had to be severe with him before he 
would let me finish. 

This done, we set forth in the homeward direc- 
tion along the belt of woods on the north shore. 
We had not gone far before Gabriel found a track 
that engaged his earnest attention, whereof he 
made loud proclamation while it led him across the 
wide pasture to the woods of Cedar Point, which is 
the southernmost headland of the cape and the 
largest piece of woods upon it. In a moment the 
woods were filled with quick reverberations of the 
hound's melodious voice. Assured that the fox was 
afoot and that there was no time to lose, I put my 
best foot forward for the corner of a fence which 



SOBAPSQUA 97 

ran across nearly to the woods and divided the 
pasture from a meadow. The desired point was 
scarcely reached when I saw the fox break cover, a 
tawny dot in the woodside, now growing and grow- 
ing into distinctive form as it rapidly drew nearer 
along a cowpath that ran close beside the fence. 
Now he was not more than two gunshots from me, 
the butt of the gun was at my shoulder, my finger 
touching the trigger, and I could almost feel this 
fellow's pelt in my right pocket comfortably bal- 
ancing the one in my left, when a herd of young 
cattle discovered him and charging in a mad 
stampede drove him through the fence into the 
meadow, across which he took a diagonal course, 
well out of my range. I fired with a forlorn hope 
of cripphng him, but only increased the velocity 
of the ruddy streak which vanished in an instant 
and left the world a blank. 

Presently the leaden sky came closer to the earth, 
and then became one with it in a dense snowfall, 
and muffled in its thick veil Gabriel's trumpet notes 
sounded faintly far away, as he pottered over the 
blotted scent. The six miles' tramp home was leg- 
wearying, as all can testify who have taken so long 
a walk in the first snow, but my luck had been good 
enough and I should have been satisfied, yet the 
vanishing form of that fox stood forth then as it 
stands even now in unpleasant distinctness, clearer 
than aught else in the day's events. 



98 SOBAPSQUA 

Immense flocks of ducks used to cruise along 
the shores and come out on the shelving rocks, 
sometimes in very dangerous places, where am- 
bushed gunners lay in wait to rake the huddled 
throng with a charge of BB shot. In some cases a 
dozen or more were killed by a single discharge. 
Frank Brady got eighteen with two barrels. Old 
Justin Cyr killed as many with one discharge of 
his ancient Queen's arm. This was very unsports- 
manlike, and in no wise to be compared with the 
exploits of men who kill a hundred ducks on the 
wing in a day's shooting and are still unsatisfied. 
Our pot-hunters fired but one shot and went home 
quite content with the result, and from year to 
year there was no noticeable decrease in the num- 
bers of waterfowl till the generation of "true 
sportsmen" with improved weapons began to 
multiply. 

It is not to be denied that there is a degree of 
excitement in the stealthy approach to a flock of 
wary, dusky ducks, or in lying in wait, silent and 
motionless, for them to swim within range, mean- 
while observing the autumnal beauty of earth and 
sky out of the corners of one's eyes, sniflBing the 
fragrant odor of ripe leaves, and listening to the 
pulse of lazy ripples, and undeniably there is a 
satisfaction in the successful shot. Nevertheless 
it was pot-hunting that one should blush with 
shame for having indulged in, yet somehow I do 



SOBAPSQUA 99 

not, only as the recollection of some inexcusably 
bad shot comes back to me. 

I am glad I do not know how a man feels after 
shooting a hundred ducks that have flown past his 
stand or stooped to his decoys in one day. It seems 
to me that one should feel remorse rather than 
exultation for such a feat. 

The beautiful island in the north bay which 
was called Birch Island when I first knew it, clad 
then with a thick growth of white birch and cedar, 
was a beloved resort of ducks, and its secluded 
shores were seldom disturbed by gunners. By 
change of ownership its name became Yale's, then 
Holmes's, and is now Putnam's after the present 
owner, who has a handsome summer house there 
and has so improved the place that the wild ducks 
have forsaken it. 

I think this may be the place where the devoted 
missionary, Isaac Jogues, ran the gantlet and 
suffered other tortures from his savage captors 
while he and his fellow-captives were being carried 
to the Mohawk country, for though by no means 
situated on the southern part of the lake, it is the 
southernmost island which answers at all the de- 
scription given of the halting-place of the war 
party, by Parkman, in his *'The Jesuits in North 
America": 

"On the eighth day they learned that a large 
Iroquois war party, on their way to Canada, were 



100 SOBAPSQUA 

near at hand; and they soon approached their 
camp, on a small island near the southern end of 
Lake Champlain. The warriors, two hundred in 
number, saluted their victorious countrymen with 
volleys from their guns; then, armed with clubs 
and thorny sticks, ranged themselves in two lines, 
between which the captives were compelled to pass 
up the side of a rocky hill. On the way they were 
beaten with such fury that Jogues, who was last 
in the line, fell powerless, drenched in blood and 
half dead. As the chief man among the French 
captives, he fared the worst. His hands were 
again mangled, and fires applied to his body; 
while the Huron chief, Eustache, was subjected to 
tortures even more atrocious. When, at night, the 
exhausted sufferers tried to rest, the young warriors 
came to lacerate their wounds and pull out their 
hair and beards." 

One can hardly realize that scenes now so 
steeped in the serenity of peace should ever have 
witnessed such barbarities. 

The shores of this island can no longer tempt 
me, as they once did years and years ago, to steal 
a boat wherewith to get close to the congregation 
of ducks assembled in and about them on that 
October Sunday. My companion and I broke 
two commandments and were not penitent, but 
I trust Heaven forgave us, for we were only 
boys and returned the boat just as we found it, 



SOBAPSQUA 101 

and got nine lusty, dusky ducks, half as big as 
geese. 

John Hough, an old man whose memory ran 
back to the last days of deer-hunting here, told me 
that the deer, started on Mount Philo, used to run 
to water at Thompson's Point, as the lay of the 
land would lead one to guess. 

Here the relentless slayers of the last deer lay in 
wait for their prey, while, faint and far away, the 
hound's first notes drifting down the wind-blown 
crest of Mount Philo, then swelling to a jangle of 
echoes in the nearer woods, the hunted deer 
plunged into the lake and the rifle spat out its 
spiteful charge, or the long smooth-bore belched 
forth its double charge of ball and buckshot, and 
the rocky steeps of Sobapsqua, offering life and 
safety, faded out of the glazing eyes. 

The days of the deer were long ago when the 
Point was still a half wilderness, and the days of 
the fox and the wild duck are almost fallen into 
the past, for the place has become a fashionable 
resort, and is populous with deluded people who 
imagine themselves to be camping out. In fact, 
they live luxuriously in furnished cottages, with 
carpets on their floors and cushioned chairs, and 
have dinners of divers courses, with napery of 
fine linen and service of choice ware. I am told 
that they not only undress to go to bed at night, 
but that the women-folk actually change their 



102 SOBAPSQUA 

elegant apparel two or three times during the day. 
Poor souls ! little they know of the freedom of real 
camp-life, the comfort of one shabby suit that does 
service day and night, the disenthrallment from 
the care of tableware, and the cleansing of many 
utensils from over-neatness and punctilious eti- 
quette, but yet not from true politeness. 

Scaffolded on mattressed bedsteads over car- 
peted floors, how shall they so much as guess what 
restful sleep comes to him who lies close to the 
bosom of Mother Earth, with naught between but 
a blanket and a litter of fragrant cedar twigs? 
What poor comradeship must there be among 
those who gather around a black stove, compared 
with such as encircle the genial blaze of a camp- 
fire, and how shall those feel themselves near to 
Nature who are shut from the sky and the woods 
by wooden walls and roofs? 

The best of camp-life is in escaping from the 
wearisome burdens of civilization and in some 
measure renewing the old relationship with Na- 
ture. 

The change has been even greater on the other 
side of the north bay at Cedar Beach, which has 
undergone a change of name as well as of character 
since the time when we followed fugitive foxes 
from Thompson's Point thither, or made fresh 
starts among the vulpine residents of its wild seclu- 
sion. It was known as McNiell's Point then, after 



SOBAPSQUA 103 

its pioneer owner, who established a ferry just 
north of it, which was continued by his descendants 
with various craft — sloops, horse-boats, and a 
natty Httle steamboat. It was a famous thorough- 
fare until the building of the railroad, which revo- 
lutionized everything. Then there were no more 
great droves of cattle making leisurely progress 
toward Boston on the hoof, nor any longer much 
faring to and fro across the ferry on the business of 
traflSc or visiting, and the idle ferryman and the 
guestless publican lounged on the rotting wharf in 
mutual condolence. 

Yet the little wilderness on the Point, seldom 
invaded by human kind except the infrequent 
woodman, the more infrequent meditative woods 
lounger and the hunter, and throbbing in spring- 
time with the beat of the partridge's drum, ringing 
all summer long with the songs of a multitude of 
birds, echoing in the golden days of autumn with 
the melody of hounds, still preserved its sylvan 
seclusion and kept its homely name, till it was dis- 
covered by some *'hey due" explorers, who re- 
christened it and made it fashionable. 

Spick-and-span cottages, even elegant resi- 
dences, are built upon its heights; a steamer 
comes to it regularly twice a day during the sum- 
mer, and the thronged woods are noisy with gay 
pleas ure-seekers . 

It is all spoiled for us old-fashioned camp- 



104 SOBAPSQUA 

dwellers, but no more, perhaps, than our barbarous 
modes would spoil it for these dainty folk. I can 
imagine how their sensibilities would be shocked at 
the sight of our uncouth living, our lairs of boughs 
and blankets, our unnapered table, with the frying- 
pan serving for platter and common plate, no less 
than our sense of the fitness of things is hurt by 
this flaunting of fashion in the face of Nature. 

They wonder at our ways, we at theirs, being 
unable to understand what they can find in all 
that they enjoy to compensate for what we have 
lost — the freedom from care and conventionalities 
that were ours in these wild corners, when the 
click of the croquet ball, the incongruous jingle of 
pianos, and the babble of human voices did not 
overbear the whispers of the wind in the trees, the 
songs of birds and the soft laps of waves on quiet 
shores. 



BLACK-BASS-FISHING IN 
SUNGAHNEETUK 

Among the Vermont rivers emptying into Lake 
Champlain that were once salmon streams, is the 
beautiful little river which the Indians named 
"Sungahneetuk," the "Fishing-Place River." 
The salmon long since ceased to inhabit any of 
these, only now and then a straggler being taken 
even in the lake. Our Fish Commissioners have 
tried to reestablish the salmon in the rivers he 
once made famous; but, barred with dams, their 
unshaded waters heated and shrunken, thick with 
sawdust and the wash of cultivated lands, and 
poisoned with chemicals from mills and factories, 
they have undergone changes too great to allow 
them again to become his home. They are rivers 
yet, but not the cool and limpid realms whereof he 
was lord paramount in the old days, and it is no 
longer worth his while to battle the swift currents 
of the Saint Lawrence and run the gantlet of the 
Richelieu nets to come to his own again. 

In Sungahneetuk and in other streams, his 
ancient heritage, he has a smaller yet worthy 
successor, almost as game for his size, and ranking 
high among food-fishes. Hardy, prolific, armed 
defensively with firm scales and a dorsal bristling 



106 BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 

with spines, offensively with stout, sharp teeth set 
in strong jaws, the black bass holds his own against 
changed conditions and aquatic enemies, and owns 
no fish of these waters his master, unless it be the 
gar-pike, or bill-fish, a fish so invulnerably mailed 
and murderously weaponed as to be assailed or 
withstood by no other. 

Protection has done wonders for the bass, for 
all they needed was to be let alone during spawn- 
ing-time, and wherever the law has been enforced 
they have greatly increased in numbers. Up to 
the passage of a protective fish law, in 1874, it had 
been the common practice here with all who angled, 
either for pleasure or profit, to catch these fish on 
their spawning-beds in June. Whoever had eyes 
sharp enough to spy out the beds under the tangle 
of ripples and knots of foam in the shallows or be- 
neath the slow current of the translucent gray- 
green depths had only to cast his hook, no matter 
Low unskillfully masked with a worm, and the 
alert parent fish would rush to remove the intruder 
from the sacred precincts, seizing it in her mouth 
and dropping it well outside the bed, if left to have 
her own way with it. But just in the nick of time 
the angler came in, and, striking, fastened his fish, 
which ten times to one was hauled forth at once by 
stout pole and line, without a chance for life, to 
spend her strength in useless threshing of the 
daisies and clover. It was not always done in this 



J 



BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 107 

butcherly manner, but it was done in some way 
by almost every one who fished at all, and at best 
was a miserable business. 

The undiscovered and fruitful beds were few, 
the barren and orphaned ones many, and if the 
streams had been their only spawning-places the 
bass must have been almost exterminated by such 
continual persecution. But of the many adven- 
turing through stress of nature up the rivers some 
would escape, and there were the reefs and bars of 
the lake, where others might breed undisturbed by 
man, and so, among them all, perpetuate their 
race until the day of deliverance. 

The bass, having hibernated in the depths dur- 
ing the dead months, come on to the spawning- 
grounds in May, and shortly after set about mak- 
ing their beds, which, when finished, are shallow 
concavities, in diameter about twice the length of 
the fish, and from the time of completion till the 
hatching of the eggs are most vigilantly guarded 
and kept scrupulously clean. The eggs, which are 
attached to the bottom by a glutinous coating, 
are hatched in about two weeks after they are de- 
posited. If a pebble or waterlogged chip or twig is 
washed onto the bed, it is as quickly removed as is 
the hook of the angler, and all animate intruders 
are summarily driven off. The infant bass, at 
their first hatching, are as black and unpromising 
as a swarm of polliwogs in a mud-puddle, but 



108 BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 

they soon disperse, and grow rapidly, and early 
show their blood, for, long before fall, little fellows 
an inch and a half in length may be seen chasing 
minnows as big as themselves. When the spawning- 
season is well over and the law off, the bass have 
returned to the lake; but in the few days spent by 
them in the stream before spawning and the begin- 
ning of the close time, the angler is given a chance 
to take them in a perfectly legitimate manner. It 
is of one of these days' fishing along this beautiful 
stream, that, if not done very scientifically or with 
costly tackle, yet was not unfairly done, that I 
have to tell. 

Sungahneetuk winds its first slender thread 
around the ledges of the western slope of the Green 
Mountains, but soon gathers to it the strands of 
brooks spun out from ponds and swamps and 
springs, and in a little while becomes strong enough 
for the turning of mills. Many of these of different 
kinds are lodged beside it, grinding grist for the 
food of men, weaving cloth for their raiment, sawing 
boards for their cradles, shelter, and coflins. These 
three kinds of mills are all in a huddle, along with 
stores and shoemakers' and blacksmiths' shops, at 
Nutting's Curse, the lowest falls now so used, as 
if they had drifted down stream and grounded 
there, three miles above where the widened stream 
is woven into the broad sheet of Champlain. 

Half a mile below these mills, on a sunny morn- 



BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 109 

ing of a mid-May day, I begin my fishing. The 
river has drawn itself from the narrow environ- 
ment of hills, and winds among intervales ankle- 
deep with young grass, where newly turned-out 
kine are feeding greedily and new-come bobolinks 
are loudly rejoicing. By a thicket of alders, 
broadly margining and overhanging quiet waters, 
where foam-bells moulded in the last rapids swing 
in the slow eddies, I put my rod together. It is of 
hardback, hop hornbeam, ironwood, lever-wood 
— well, Ostrya Virginica, a wood which I have long 
believed the best of our native trees for rod-mak- 
ing — and I have had it made for me by a cunning 
workman. It is in three pieces and of unorthodox 
length — fifteen feet. The books say eight feet is 
the proper length for a bass-rod; but how could 
one reach over these alders or the thickets of wil- 
lows lower downstream with such a stick.^^ The 
slender line is rove through the guides, the hook 
with its gut snell bent on, and Monsieur Ruisseau, 
sometime since of Canada, comes forward with 
the bait-kettle — '*minny-pail," we call it. He 
dives therein halfway to his elbows more than once 
to no purpose, for lively minnows are slippery cus- 
tomers, but at last brings out a chub, a three-inch 
ingot, half of silver, half of brown dross, as tri- 
umphantly as if he had landed a salmon, remark- 
ing, as he hands it over, "Dar! I'ms got de coss. 
He's nice leetly feller, don't it?" 



110 BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 

Indeed he is, and I breathe a silent prayer for 
him and myself as I impale the little wretch just 
forward of the dorsal. May a big bass take him 
speedily, and may I be forgiven for my cruelty! 
This baiting the hook is the wickedness of fishing 
that one is sorry for. Five minutes later one is apt 
to be angry with the tortured, gasping wretch be- 
cause he does not swim deeper. This one is most 
obedient to my wishes, and at once sounds the 
depths, where I tenderly cast him just under the 
bank at my feet. The slack of the line is slowly 
taken up, till I can feel the faint tug of his laborious 
swimming, and with bated breath I watch and 
wait to feel the stronger tug of a bass seizing him. 
It does not come, and I cast again and again, far 
and near, with no stronger responses, till it begins 
to grow doubtful whether there are any bass here, 
or, at least, any hungry ones. 

I lose interest a little in the water, and take time 
to note how thickly the dandelions are dotting the 
grass and setting in their gold the amethyst tufts 
of violets; how the bobolinks are rollicking over 
them and the sparrows trilling their happy songs; 
how busy the robins are with their nest-building, 
their short play-day already ended; then how all 
these marginal thickets of alder and willow are 
bent downstream with the stress of the spring 
floods, and even the topmost twigs are clothed 
with knots of begrimed leaves and looped wisps of 



BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 111 

grass of last year's growth. I note, too, the fresh- 
water flotsam here stranded, of chips, cobs, slabs, 
bits of board, and rails from upstream mills and 
farms, with a child's rude toy boat, dismantled and 
unhelmed in its wild voyage, grounded on its ant- 
hill Ararat, while some little chap among the hills 
is yet searching the pebbly shores and, with as 
fond, vain hopes as ours, shading his eyes to descry 
his small ship sailing back from Spain. Here is a 
paddle gone adrift from its boat, and the cover of 
a minnow-can, with rusting hasp and hinges still 
clinging to it — signs of boatmen and fishermen 
in upper waters. 

Ruisseau has grown listless too, and for the last 
five minutes has given me no advice nor made any 
disparaging comments on my rod and line, which 
he thinks too slender. When he goes fishing he has 
a spar of white cedar for a rod and corresponding 
cordage for a line. "Dat's de way I'ms feesh in 
Canady." He has changed the water in the bait- 
kettle, and is taking his ease on the grass, with his 
pipe in full blast, the fumes pervading a cubic 
acre of May-day air. Suddenly a snap and splash 
under the farther bank brings him upright and 
alert and recalls me from the borders of dream- 
land. "DarlDar! Pull off you' line an' trow him 
ove' dar," pointing with both hands, one empha- 
sized with his black pipe, to the widening circles. 

Meekly obedient to my hired master, I make a 



m BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 

long cast, and, as much by luck as skill, deliver my 
minnow, now almost at his last gasp, in the middle 
of the concentric rings of wavelets. Scarcely has 
his fall startled the reflections of bank, bush, and 
grass-tuft to livelier dancing, when the surface is 
again broken by a sullen seething, in the midst of 
which is dimly seen the shining green broadside of 
a bass. The time given him for gorging the bait 
seems nearer five minutes than the quarter of one 
during which the line vibrates with slight jerks and 
then tightens with a steady pull as I strike, and an 
angry tug tells me that he is fast. Now the line 
cuts the water with a tremulous swish, and the rod 
bends like a bulrush in a gale, as the stricken fish 
battles upstream in a wide sweep, then shoots to 
the surface and three feet into the air, an emerald 
rocket, showering pearls and crystals. I do not 
know whether I let my "rod straighten" or "pull 
him over into the water," but somehow he gets 
back there without having rid himself of the 
barbed unpleasantness in his jaw, and then makes 
a rush downstream, varied with sharp zigzags, end- 
ing in another aerial flight as unavailing as the 
first. Then he bores his way toward a half -sunken 
log, thinking to swim under it and so get a dead 
strain on the line; but a steady pull stops him just 
short of it. Then he sounds the depths to rub the 
hook out on the bottom, for he is a fellow of ex- 
pedients; but the spring of the rod lifts him above 



BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 113 

this last help. He has exhausted his devices, and 
now makes feeble rushes in small circles and zig- 
zags and a final nerveless leap not half his length 
out of water. He has fought valiantly for life and 
liberty, but fortune has been against him. After a 
few more abortive struggles, he turns up his side to 
the sky, and is towed, almost unresistingly, along- 
side the bank. Ruisseau lifts him out trium- 
phantly, swearing, Catholic though he is, by a 
Puritan saint: *'Ba John Roger! Dat's de bes' 
'snago I have ketch in my remember ! " We test his 
weight with our eyes and forefingers, and put it at 
four pounds. Fairbanks's and Howe's contrivances 
might make it less by a pound or more; but they 
are unsatisfactory scales for anglers' use. 

The hook is rebaited, and a cast made beside 
the sunken log, and quickly answered by a petu- 
lant little bite that robs me of a minnow. 

"A cossed leetly rock-bass," Ruisseau says, and 
advises, "Put a wamm on de hook and ketch 'im 
off de water.'* 

But the smallest minnow in the pail captures 
him, and the miserable, bony, greedy, watery, big- 
mouthed little thief is hauled forth without cere- 
mony. How one can praise him for anything but 
his moderate beauty, the only virtue he has, is a 
wonder to me. The despised sunfish is handsomer, 
a better table-fish, and as great a nuisance, yet no 
one praises him. Doubtless the rock-bass has left 



114 BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 

a half-dozen of his thievish brethren in ambush 
behind him, and, rather than bother with them, 
I move on. 

The next fish that tries to rob me of a bait in- 
tended for his betters and is sent grazing for his 
tricks is a perch — a far handsomer fellow, in his 
bars of gold and dusky green, than the little bass, 
and, to my taste, worth a dozen of him on the 
table. 

So we fare downstream, taking here and there a 
bass of the right sort from deep holes, under banks, 
and in mid-channel, and from the slack-water on 
the lower side of the boulders, in no particularly 
different way from that in which the first was 
taken. Some are ingloriously lost: but the bass 
should not be grudged their share of the sport, 
which must lie in foiling the angler's arts. Besides, 
the fish that is hooked and gets away may live to be 
caught another day, and for the time of exemption 
from creel and pan pay interest of a half-pound or 
more: only one is not apt to fancy such uncertain 
usury, especially when the fish is of two or three 
pounds* present worth. 

Thus we come to the lower falls, where in old 
times the incoming salmon doubtless paid heavy 
tribute to the Indians as they scaled the first ram- 
part of ledges that barred their yearly invasion. 
This is the last mill-seat on the stream, where not 
many years ago the screech of the saw was heard 



BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 115 

above the rush of waters. It is silent now, its 
occupation gone. A mossy roof, broken and sagged 
with the snows of many winters, scantily sheltering 
reeling posts, unmoving wheels rotting and rusting 
among weeds and sprouts of willows, and a drift of 
rotten sawdust, a flume so dry that the sun shines 
through it and birds build their nests in it, a 
grassy embankment, and a few ice-battered tim- 
bers of the dam feebly reaching out against the 
flood, are all that are left of the old mill and its 
once busy life. A half-dozen mouldering logs that 
came too late for sawing represent its unperformed 
work, so near did it come to living out its days. 
Just below, a little island splits the stream un- 
equally, leaving on that side a shallow rapid 
scarcely covering the pebbly bottom, on this a 
deep current that seethes along its swift and 
narrow way. Into the head of this I cast my bait, 
and it goes whirling along it, now tossed to the 
surface, now tumbled along the bottom. For an 
instant the rod bends and jerks as the slack of the 
line is taken up by the force of the current, then 
curves into a drawn bow from tip to reel with a 
strong, sudden pull that makes the line twang like 
a bow-string. This is a hungry fellow, who makes 
no cat's play with his prey, but gorges it at the first 
snap. How lustily he pulls, with the swirling tor- 
rent to help him ! If I should lose him, he would 
go for a four-pounder at least. Keeping a steady 



116 BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 

strain on him, but letting him take a Httle Hne off 
the reel and piloting him clear of rocks and roots, 
I follow him slowly to quieter waters below, 
where we fight it out, and the land force is vic- 
torious. With the utmost tenderness toward the 
scales, he could not be made to tip them at above 
two pounds : so I have lost half my fish by saving 
him. 

The next shallow reach of the winding stream 
leads us toward the blue haze of the Adirondacks, 
lifted above the tender green of the near woods. 
At the next, the shorn slopes and bristling ridge of 
our own Mount Philo front us, and another draws 
us close to a hillside soft with leafing tamaracks. 
None of these reaches give any return for careful 
fishing. Then we come to one most promising of 
bass, where the deep, slow current slides through 
an aisle of overhanging basswoods, elms, and ashes, 
and then under a prostrate trunk, with its catch 
of driftwood, as promising of fouled hooks, and in 
neither respect am I disappointed. My minnow 
has hardly struck the water when it is contended 
for by three or four hungry bass. In this case the 
devil takes the foremost, who in a jiffy gets the 
hook fast in his mouth, and, as he darts this way 
and that to rid himself of it, is closely followed by 
his companions — who knows whether envious, 
curious, or sympathizing? A little later two of them 
lie with him among the clover. The next cast is 



BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 117 

too near the driftwood. The minnow gets among 
it, and the hook is snagged. Ruisseau helps me 
out of the scrape with some swearing and a possibly 
more effective pole, and I suffer no loss but of time, 
patience, a hook, and part of a snell. The re- 
maining bass can hardly wait for their turn while 
I am bending on a new hook and rebaiting. They 
come close to the surface, underseeing the opera- 
tion, and then in turn they are served out. 

The next loop of the stream is cast about a 
wooded bank, and in it, on a sandy shallow, is a 
swarm of "rock," or "sand pike," handsome little 
fellows, with barred sides, the largest among them 
not exceeding four inches in length. All are hug- 
ging the golden, shimmering bottom, casting their 
spawn and milt. 

In a deeper rapid three or four large suckers 
are heading the swift current, as motionless as if 
moored there. A boy, with a noose of brass wire 
at the end of a pole, is trying to snare one, for our 
suckers are true to their name, and never bite. 
After much slow and careful maneuvering, he gets 
it midway inside the noose, and with a vigorous 
pull throws it out, and there is a happy boy and a 
most unhappy fish. 

Presently we come to the wide, deep pool known 
as the "Dixon Hole," and under its sheltering 
elms eat our lunch and moisten it with Sungah- 
neetuk, this year's vintage of mountain snows. 



118 BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 

and dry it again with smoke of the Virginian and 
the ranker Northern weed, home-grown by Ruis- 
seau. The ashes and charred brands of a recent 
fishing-fire remind him of his favorite sport, con- 
cerning which he discourses: "I'd drudder feesh 
fo' buU-pawt as basses." This he does at night, by 
the cheerful Hght of a pine-knot fire, with his spar 
of cedar and stout line and big hook baited with a 
tangle of worms, and anchored with a ponderous 
sinker, the splash of which, when he casts it, 
rouses echoes out of the circle of gloom which sur- 
rounds him. Sometimes he gets a hundred bull- 
pouts and two or three or more eels. "An' de eel 
an' de bull-pawt ees de bes' feesh I'ms like, ex- 
pectin' shad": by which he means to except the 
white fish of the lake, known here as "lake shad." 
Ruisseau having reslain his thousands, I resume 
actual fishing, and soon behold a monstrous bass, 
who lounges leisurely up to inspect my bait and 
then tiu'ns contemptuously away. He has an eye 
upon me through the limpid depths. He is a vet- 
eran cruiser of these waters, and knows the tricks 
of men — a philosopher who can trace effect back 
to cause, from struggling minnow along line and 
rod to the guiding hand on shore. Again and again 
I tempt him, to no purpose, and then reluctantly 
leave him, to try for less sophisticated fish below, 
but noting his haunt by a certain bush. A little 
later I return, making a wide detour, and, when I 



BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 119 

near the marked bush, drop on my hands and 
knees, and so get within six feet of the brink with- 
out seeing the water or being seen by any of its 
denizens, and hghtly drop my minnow out of 
sight behind the grassy bank. The trick succeeds : 
here is a minnow without a man, and the lord of 
the pool seizes his tribute at sight and is fast at the 
first snap. Then the tough fibers of the lithe rod 
are tried to their utmost, first to keep him from 
gaining the vantage-ground of some sunken logs 
and brush, then to lead him to a clearer field, 
when he makes a rush, spinning fifteen yards of 
retarded line off the reel, and, with a surging leap, 
flies into the air, shakes the hook from his mouth, 
and leaves me disconsolate. It is small consolation 
to think that I have added to his wisdom and that 
he will not dare touch another minnow for a week 
— as small as that contained in Ruisseau's **I 'ms 
tole you you'll lost him, sartain." Likely enough 
before he has forgotten the lesson he will be 
dragged ashore in an unlawful seine or smitten 
under the fifth rib by a spearer prowling by torch- 
light. As ignominious was the death of the last 
salmon of this stream, which, tradition says, was 
speared by some boys with a pitchfork, a few turns 
below here, on a June day sixty years ago. 

Slower than the stream flows we follow it where 
curling deeps promise fruitfulness of fish, trying 
every foot of such water, sometimes rewarded 



120 BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 

with the fulfillment, sometimes not, and faster 
when the thin, barren current ripples over pebbly 
and sandy shoals, shortening now and then our 
course a half-mile by a cross-cut of a few rods. 

Climbing the two fences of a road and passing 
its bridge, and then skirting a wide thicket of 
willows, we come to a farm-bridge, beside which an 
aged Quakeress is fishing. Perhaps it has been 
"borne in upon her" that she should go a-fishing 
to-day: at any rate, she has been "greatly 
favored," and shows us with quiet pride a goodly 
string of fish tethered under the abutment, con- 
spicuous among them the bristling olive backs and 
golden-green sides of half a dozen fine bass. Look- 
ing upon her placid face, one may well believe 
angling a gentle art if it can draw to it such a 
saintly devotee. The stream has grown as placid as 
she, and now winds voiceless between its willowy 
banks, giving no sign of its flow but by some glid- 
ing leaf or twig and the arrowy ripples of dipping 
branches and mid-stream snags. 

Here is a straight reach, hedged on one side 
with willows tall and low, interwoven with wild 
grapevines, on the other walled with a green bank 
topped with a clump of second-growth pines and 
hemlocks. Looking back through this vista, we 
see the noble peak of Tawabedeewadso, bright with 
last winter's snow, shining against the eastern sky. 

On the opposite bank I get a glimpse of a rival 



BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 121 

fisher stealing warily through the thicket in a coat 
now rusty and ragged, though two months ago, 
sleek and glossy enough. Without rod, snare, or 
spear, the mink is a notable destroyer of fish. 
Not so silent is the kingfisher that comes jerking 
his way through the air, sending his rattling cry 
before him and leaving its echoes clattering far 
behind him. Now he hangs as if suspended by a 
thread while he scans the water twenty feet be- 
neath him. Then the thread breaks, and he drops 
headlong, and, almost before the spray of his 
plimge has fallen, rises with a little fish on his short 
spear. 

Here, too, minnows are taken in succession by 
some fish biting differently from a bass, but evi- 
dently larger than rock-bass or perch. A third 
minnow is offered him grudgingly, for frequent 
drafts and some deaths occurring in spite of half- 
hourly changes of the water have reduced the little 
prisoners of the bait-kettle to a dozen. Success has 
made him bold, and boldness works his ruin, for 
this time he swallows hook and bait. He swims 
deeper than the bass, and as stubbornly for a 
while, but gives up sooner, and, as he is drawn 
gasping alongside the bank, proves to be a fine 
pike-perch of two and a half or three pounds* 
weight. He is not a frequent navigator so far up 
the stream, but is often caught near the mouth in 
adjacent Wonakakatuk and in great numbers in the 



122 BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 

lake, notably at Kozoapsqua and Sobapsqua. He 
is handsome, game, and in every way a good fish. 

Again my hook gets foul in a drift of brushwood, 
and Ruisseau, wading out to clear it, again lapses 
into profanity over his *'jim rubbits, half fill of 
de creek!" With the Canuck, india-rubber is 
always "jim rubbit." 

As the stream is drawn to the level of the lake, 
its character changes more and more. The sluggish 
current sweeps slowly under the double-curved 
branches of great water-maples, whose ice-scarred 
trunks rise from low banks rank with sedge and 
wild grass and sloping backward to wide, marshy 
swamps, where we hear bitterns booming, rails 
cackling, innumerable frogs piping and croaking, 
and the fine, monotonous chime of toads, and 
mysterious voices that may be those of birds or of 
reptiles supposed to be voiceless. Every stream- 
w^ard-slanting log now has its row of basking 
turtles that tumble oQ at our approach, and the 
little green heron launches as clumsily from his 
perch in the tall trees and goes flapping before us. 
Now our way is barred by an impassable outlet of 
the swamp on one side, and here I catch the last 
bass of the day. 

A swarm of little fish, the biggest not an inch 
long, come swimming upstream, a school, yards in 
length, hugging our shore. As here and there a 
silver side flashes in the sunlight, it is as if a suit 



BASS-FISHING IN SUNGAHNEETUK 123 

of chain-armor was being drawn through the 
water. Now a swift bolt strikes it from beneath, 
and a hundred shining Unks are driven into the 
air. In the bubbUng swirl beneath the break I see 
the brazen mail of a bass, and a few feet upstream 
I drop my minnow, a prey far more tempting than 
these atoms, and no sooner seen than seized. In 
the fight that ensues I have some trouble to lead 
him to a fairer field and a proper place for surren- 
der, to do which he must be got over a sort of 
boom which serves for a water-fence, being a single 
pole spanning the stream, in the middle sagging an 
inch or two below the surface. Shortening my 
line and raising the tip of the rod, I half lift, half 
drag him over it, and, after some further skirmish- 
ing, bring him to shore, and Ruisseau, wading into 
the mud halfway to the top of his "jim rubbits" 
to rescue him, shows himself an artist, making a 
bas-relief in clay. 

As I range the result of my day's sport side by 
side along the sod, a comely rank of fifteen bass 
and one pike-perch, Ruisseau proudly remarks, 
"I'ms guess dat ole wimmens ain't beat me, don't 
it.?" 

The sun is burning the low clouds and setting 
the western edge of the world on fire, and so, mak- 
ing a jail-delivery of our few remaining minnows, 
we turn backward on our long shadows and wend 
our way homeward. 



ON A GLASS ROOF 

Winter fishing in Northern latitudes is not the 
perfection of the sport of anghng. It lacks many 
of the things which contribute to make that a fine 
art and a delightful pastime. The fine tackle of the 
fly-fisher and the skill to handle it properly, the 
long-contested and exciting fight between man 
and fish, are not for him who goes fishing in winter. 
Neither for him is the balmy air that wafts the 
odor of blossoms and voices of song-birds and 
babble of free streams, nor verdant sward, nor 
leafy woods, nor glint of sunlit waters. In fact, 
it savors somewhat of the pot ; for it is often more 
the object to get fish than sport. But any fishing 
is better than no fishing; and when we remember 
that our fishing-days are growing fewer as the path 
behind us grows longer, it behooves us to make the 
most of those that are left us. Furthermore, it may 
be said in favor of this fishing that in one respect 
it excels all others — that is, in the proportion 
which the pleasiu*e of getting ready for it bears to 
the actual sport. Though there are no flies to be 
artistically tied, nor fine rods to be inspected, nor 
reels to be oiled, the simple tackle must be over- 
hauled and made ready in its way, and proper hooks 
and lines provided. If one is to try for pickerel 



ON A GLASS ROOF 125 

through the ice, he must make his "jacks," or 
"tilt-ups," and have them so nicely balanced that 
they will give no sign of the struggles of the live 
bait, yet rise at the first touch of "Long Face's" 
jaws. Over all these preparations one will have a 
good time with himself and his thoughts, whether 
or not he, at last, gets any result from his pleasant 
labors. One must have the provident forethought 
to dig his worms in the fall and store them in his 
cellar if he intends to go perch-fishing in winter, 
and to catch his minnows while the brooks are 
open, and keep and feed them in a water-trough or 
spring-hole till the winter day that he takes them 
pickerel-fishing. One needs not to go far for the bait 
for smelt and herring, for the pork-barrel furnishes 
that till the first fish of each kind is caught, when 
an eye or undercut of the tail of the smelt and a 
bit of the chin of the herring are used to lure their 
brethren to the upper world, where death and the 
frying-pan await them. 

I do not know how many times I had promised 
to take myself a-fishing the next winter and had 
made some preparation toward fulfilling the prom- 
ise. More than once I had dug a quart of worms 
in the latest pleasant, unfrozen days of fall, and 
put them in a big box of earth in the cellar; but 
among all the short days of many a long winter 
the day wherein to go fishing had never come, and 
in spring the worms, their destiny unfulfilled, were 



126 ON A GLASS ROOF 

set free, to bore to the core of the world if they 
chose. I had once laid in a stock of minnows, 
caught with mutual pains, of which the only good 
I got in winter was in watching and feeding them, 
and by June, when I might have used them for 
bass-bait, such friendly relations had grown up 
between us that I could not find it in my heart 
to treat them so cruelly, and so turned them out 
in the nearest stream for Nature to deal with as 
she would — let them grow to the utmost of min- 
nowhood, or feed them to her big fish, or let them 
be twitched out by the pin-hooks of her boys. It 
was a tough tender-heartedness, I confess — like 
turning adrift a kitten one dislikes to kill. 

So winter after winter had come and melted 
away, adding nothing to my experience, but a little 
to my knowledge of winter fishing, got verbally 
from old fishermen, and, with that, strength to my 
determination that I would some time go. At last 
the day came, a March day, with a promise of 
spring in the soft sky that endomed the winter 
landscape, when I found myself fairly started, well 
outfitted with an ice-slick for cutting holes, worms 
for perch, fat pork for smelt and herring, and tackle 
for all three. 

The air was sharp and frosty, though the sun 
had got a good hour above the Green Mountains, 
— white enough now, — and there was a firm 
crust that would bear, which makes the best of 



ON A GLASS ROOF 127 

walking, as a crust that will not bear makes the 
worst. On such good footing, with all my outfit 
pocketable but the ice-slick, and that almost as 
good shoulder-ballast as a gun, I got on so speedily 
that I was soon on the "Crik," a broad and level 
roadway to the lake. At the last turn of this I 
found a couple of men fishing for pickerel, and 
stopped for a little chat with them and to see what 
sport they were having. Our conversation was 
mostly carried on at long range, fired back and 
forth across the ice — for they had a line of holes 
cut two rods or so apart for fifty rods along the 
channel, and the jack set at the farthest hole was 
as likely as any to point skyward and start them 
racing to it. Then I, at the farthest upstream hole, 
would watch them as they reached the jack, 
snatched it up, and quickly overhauled the line, 
pulling out sometimes a pickerel, sometimes a 
naked hook which the pickerel had got the better 
of and robbed of its minnow. They would shout 
back the tidings of their luck if good, or roll it back 
in a growl if bad, and then come leisurely toward 
me till another jack arose to beckon them more 
swiftly forward. 

As I stooped to examine the fashion of a jack, 
the tip of it flew up and nearly bumped my nose, 
resenting which I laid hold of it and caught a three- 
pound pickerel, or rather the hook caught him, 
and I only pulled him out onto the drier side of the 



128 ON A GLASS ROOF 

ice, for the hook and line and jack and the tor- 
tured minnow do most of the fishing. The angler 
only baits the hooks and sets them to fishing, while 
he watches them and pulls out their catch. 

These jacks are two slender pieces of wood, 
about filfteen inches long, turning on each other 
on a pivot at the middle. When in use the ends of 
the under piece rest upon the ice on either side of 
the hole. The upper stick, now at right angles 
with the under, has its heavier end also resting on 
the ice, while the lighter end holds the ten- or 
fifteen-foot line, a slight pull on which raises the 
butt of the upper stick and signals the alert fisher- 
man to it. 

Wishing my short-time friends good luck, I left 
them racing with their fish and went my way. 
Theirs could not be called a high order of sport, 
but it is good fun wherewith to stir the dullness of 
winter, for one cannot help getting excited in the 
game if the fish are biting freely and three or four 
jacks are up at once. It is better than toasting 
one's shins at the fire on such a day as this. 

Presently I was out upon the broad bay of the 
lake which the old French explorers named the "Bay 
of the Vessels," whether for their own craft, the 
birch boats of the Indians, or the vessels of pottery 
found here, many fragments of which the lake 
even now tosses ashore or exhumes from the banks. 
If in either way it would give me one perfect sue- 



ON A GLASS ROOF 129 

cotash-pot just as it came from the hand of the 
Waubanakee squaw that fashioned it, or with the 
smutch of camp-fire smoke upon it, I should prize 
it above all the old china in the world. But I was 
born too late for such a gift, and get only shards. 

As I skirted the rugged, silent shore, walking 
where last summer I boated, there were traces 
enough of the fierce fight that had raged before the 
cold subdued the lake and got it safe under hatches. 
All the nearest rocks and trees were mantled with 
ice, the spray of the last waves hurled ashore by 
the north wind, and twenty rods lakeward was a 
line of broken cakes, frozen into a jagged barricade, 
where the open water made its last stand. All 's 
quiet now along Petowbowk, and King Frost 
reigns supreme and majestic. But the captive 
begins to groan as the sun, his deliverer, climbs 
upward and northward. Two months hence he will 
be playing tyrant in his turn, buffeting craft, water- 
fowl, and shores. 

Beyond the first grim headland that clasps the 
bay, I saw some steadfast, upright specks, which 
I took to be fishermen, and, having faith that they 
knew better than I where to fish, made my way 
toward them. Coming nearer, some of the specks 
proved to be men, while other bigger ones turned 
out to be young evergreen trees set in the ice — 
better than the men, likely enough, if they had 
been left growing, but now only brush-heaps to 



130 ON A GLASS ROOF 

break the wind off the smaller specks. An ignoble 
use, I thought, to put a lusty young tree to for so 
short a time, presently to go drifting about the lake, 
doing no good to even so much as the eye of man. y 
How much it might have done if the axe had spared 
it for a hundred years! Oh, these cursed hackers 
and hewers of trees! Will they never stay their , 
hands from destroying the beauty and goodness of 
the earth? 

Every hole already had its man, if not its bush, 
and I had to cut one for myself: so, slipping the 
thong of the slick over my wrist, I began chiseling, 
like a woodpecker mortising a tree for his grub, 
only I was boring haphazard, while his feathered 
ear or horny nose leads him straight to his prey. 
I cannot hear a fish swim, nor smell one till he is 
above water or in the frying-pan. But as a grub 
might be anywhere in the wood, so might a fish 
be anywhere in the water. I began to wonder how 
many bushels of crystals one must hew to come to 
the water of Petowbowk at this season ; but at last I 
struck through to it, and it came to meet me faster 
than I wished, before I got the bottom of the hole 
big enough to let through the biggest fish I iur 
tended to catch. 

Then I put a worm on my hook and dropped it 
through the scuttle I had made in the glass roof of 
the house of the fishes, and invitied them up to take 
a look at the sky which they tad not seen for so 



ON A GLASS ROOF 131 

many weeks. Sunbeams, moonlight, and rays of 
stars had come to them but dimly and distorted 
in their recent quiet life; but they seemed satisfied 
with it, undisturbed by the tumult of winter storms 
and buffeting of waves, and had no desire to see 
anything of the world aboveboard. 

For an hour I had such exciting sport as fishing 
in the well or cistern at home would have afforded, 
for not a bite did I get. It made it none the pleas- 
anter to see my neighbors hauling out both perch 
and smelt, while my bait — tempting enough for 
the best of them, I thought — dangled untouched, 
if not unnoticed, by even the least minnow. I 
began to imagine my luckier or more skillful neigh- 
bors the fishermen laughing at me, if they were 
not too busy with their own affairs, and doubted 
not that my nearer neighbors of the nether world 
were on the broad grin, peering up at me. 

"How many miles has he come just to show 
himself to us.'^ And not much to look at at that, 
for he is not handsome, neither is he terrible, like 
the Canucks who are making such havoc among 
our friends over there. Does he look rather green? 
Or is it only that we see him through this emerald 
water?" 

Some such whispers, I fancied, came from below. 
I made my line fast to a stick laid across the hole, 
and went visiting, for lack of something better to 
do, which is a winter custom in these parts. 



132 ON A GLASS ROOF 

I called first on the nearest fisherman, an ancient 
Canuck, so old, I thought, that, being of no use at 
home, his grown-up great-grandchildren had sent 
him fishing. Here he was valuable, for he had 
the gift of his race, and two or three dozen lusty 
perch were lying on the ice about him. He kept his 
short black pipe continually in blast when not re- 
charging it, smoking home-grown, greenish-black 
tobacco twisted into a half-inch rope which must 
have been endless, and so rank that I thought the 
friends of his youth in Canada might have their 
memories of him refreshed with a sniff of it, now 
that the south wind was blowing. As he knew as 
httle English as I French, we had no very sociable 
intercourse, and it soon grew rather dull for both 
of us. So after a short tarry I moved on to the next 
hole, held by a younger Canadian. He had con- 
quered the Queen's English, which if he did not 
murder outright he treated barbarously. He was 
also a conqueror of fish, and many of his victims 
lay about him, dead and dying, — perch in mail of 
iron and gold, smelt sheathed in silver, and herring 
in mother-of-pearl armor of all nacreous hues and 
tints. 

"You don' ketch no feesh, ain't it.'^" he cried, 
with a grin. " Wal, da's too bad. Ah'm sorry, me." 
I doubted his sorrowing much for this, for these 
Canucks think all the fish and all the berries belong 
to them. 



ON A GLASS ROOF 133 

"Hah! Dis pooty col','' he said, beating his 
breast with his red hands. "'F Ah feesh here 
mauch, Ah have haouse. But prob'ly Ah won't, 
prob'ly Ah will." 

He told me that wherever on the lake his breth- 
ren make a business of winter fishing it is done 
mostly in little board huts, which are moved out 
upon the ice when it has fairly made for the season, 
and hauled ashore before the spring break-up. 
In these little houses the fisherman spends his days 
and nights, for they are very comfortable, being 
banked with snow and furnished with a stove and 
bunk. A movable floor-board gives access to the 
fishing-hole beneath. This is the hatchway to a 
noble common cellar, reaching from Wood Creek 
to the Richelieu in length, and in width from Ver- 
mont to New York State, stored with plenty of 
food and drink of the wholesomest. It must be a 
cozy way of fishing, and, I thought, would suit me; 
for if, as it seemed, I was to get no fish, I might take 
my bad luck comfortably and shut out from prying 
eyes — keep it unknown to any but myself and the 
fish. My new acquaintance told me much of his 
affairs, of his luck in fishing at all seasons, of the 
money he had earned in haying and in chopping, 
and bragged of his wonderful horse: 

"He worse more as hundTed dollar. *F you 
want heem go slow, he go slow ! 'F you want heem 
go fas', jus' de same! Yas, sir." 



134 ON A GLASS ROOF 

Of our withered neighbor he said: "He got too 
hole. Wen Ah got hole lak heem, Ah been dead 
great many year' 'go!" 

He used the shortest rod I ever saw employed, 
it being only about a foot in length, with a slender 
cross-piece more than half as long, to wind up the 
line upon when not in use. When he had hooked a 
fish he tossed this aside and pulled it out hand over 
hand. He said that, besides perch, smelt, and blue- 
fish, they occasionally caught a pike-perch, a little 
rock-pike, and "de mudder of de eel," as he called 
the ling and believed it to be. If this theory will 
help settle the vexed question of the generation of 
the eel, the scientists are welcome to it, if they will 
only give credit therefor to my friend Joseph 
Gerard, of Vermont, commonly known as Joe 
Gero. 

The perch and smelt swim deep for the most 
part, and are usually fished for a little off the 
bottom. Worms are the best bait for perch; but 
after one smelt is caught his eyes are used to lure 
his fellows. It is said that these Champlain smelt 
do not visit salt water, though they might if they 
would; but they have the cucumber smell and 
taste of those taken in tide-waters. The salmon 
herring, lake herring, or whatever he is who here 
bears the name of "bluefish," is a recent comer to 
these waters; for, from all I can learn, he was un- 
known here till within ten or twelve years. No one 



ON A GLASS ROOF 135 

can deny that he is a very handsome fish, symmet- 
rical in form, and, when first taken from the water, 
of beautiful mother-of-pearl hues; but as to his 
goodness opinions differ. The flesh is rather soft, 
and has its share of bones, but is of rich flavor. 
When he bites he comes close to the surface for the 
morsel of fat pork or bit of his brother's belly that 
is offered him, with a constant, gentle motion. 
When he is seen to take the bait, the angler strikes 
at once, or it is spit out. He is very shy, perhaps 
through being a stranger in strange waters, and 
will fly from the fisherman's shadow or sudden 
motion. 

The ideal angler has quiet ways; and, observing 
that my third and last fellow-fisherman — if I 
had a right to claim such fellowship — kept to his 
post as steadfastly as an Esquimaux to a seal-hole, 
never wasting a motion, I was attracted to him. 
He proved to be a Waubanakee of Saint Francis, 
plying the gentle art here in the warpath of his 
ancestors. One fishing here two hundred years 
ago would have needed to keep at least one eye 
open for something more than fish, but both his 
little black ones were intent upon his line. From 
our low standpoint the rough, indented shore of 
Split Rock Mountain showed only as a straight 
ice-line, and it seemed as if a war party might slip 
by, unseen, behind the round of the world. Over 
there passed many a one, to and fro, in the old days 



136 ON A GLASS ROOF 

— Iroquois, Waubanakees, and whites; notable 
among them, with a bloody page in history, that of 
De Sainte-Helene and De Mantet, French and 
Indians, creeping like panthers toward doomed 
Schenectady, then returning, gorged with blood 
and pillage. 

This tamed great-grandson of those panthers 
looked peaceable and kindly enough, but was at 
first as taciturn as his ancestors could have been, 
and as slow to be drawn into conversation as the 
fish to the companionship which I desired of them; 
but, baiting with tobacco and lunch, I at last drew 
some talk from him. He told me that he and a few 
of his people were wintering in a neighboring vil- 
lage, making baskets and bows and arrows. They 
found but little sale for these, and, for want of 
something better to do, he had come a-fishing. 
Years before I had known some of his people, and 
through him I learned somewhat of my old ac- 
quaintances. One of them was Swasin Tahmont, 
who I doubt not was the Tahmunt Swasen of 
Thoreau's "Maine Woods." I was surprised to 
hear that he had gone to the happy hunting- 
grounds by the fire-water way, for when I knew 
him he would not touch whiskey and was very 
pious. He used to sing hymns to me in Waubana- 
kee, and always said grace before his musquash- 
meat. Wadso, who many years ago had told me 
the Indian names of all these streams, had also 



ON A GLASS ROOF 137 

gone thither, but by a better path. His father 
still lives, the oldest man of his tribe. He com- 
manded the Waubanakee warriors at the battle 
of Plattsburg. My new acquaintance had fleshed 
his war-arrows, having served in a New York regi- 
ment in the Civil War, and he looked as if he might 
have done good service. I wondered if then any 
of the old savagery had been awakened in him — if 
the war-whoop had risen to his lips when his regi- 
ment charged, or if he had been tempted to scalp a 
fallen foe. I heard of a Caughnawaga in one of 
our Vermont regiments who, when reproached for 
kicking a wounded rebel, justified himself by say- 
ing, "Me 'list, to kill um!" That was setting forth 
the truth with unpleasant plainness. 

The ice was now whooping like a legion of In- 
dians. Its wild, mysterious voice would first be 
heard faint and far away, then come rushing to- 
ward us swifter than the wind, with increasing 
volume of groans and yells, till it seemed as if the 
ice was about to yawn beneath us and devour us. 
The fish quit biting — as well they might, with a 
pother overhead enough to frighten a hungry saint 
from his meals. If I had been alone I should have 
fled to the shore; but, seeing my companion un- 
disturbed by the uproar, I tried to feel at ease. 
When I asked him what made this noise, he simply 
answered, "The ice." That was reason enough 
for him, and he evidently thought it should satisfy 



138 ON A GLASS ROOF 

me. I asked him if his people had any legend 
connected with it, and he answered, with a quiet 
laugh, *'I've heard some stories 'bout it, but I 
guess they wa'n't very true." 

After some coaxing, he told me this: "You know 
that big rock in the lake off north — Rock Dunder, 
you call it.^ Wal, our people use to call that Woja- 
hose — that means *the forbidder' — 'cause every 
time our people pass by it in their canoes, if they 
did n't throw some tobacco or corn or something 
to it, the big devil that live in it would n't let 'em 
go far without a big storm come, and maybe 
drowned 'em. He forbid 'em. Wal, bimeby they 
got sick of it — s'pose maybe they did n't always 
have much corn an' tobacco to throw 'way so — 
and the priests all pray their god to make Woja- 
hose keep still an' not trouble 'em. After they 
prayed a long time, he promised 'em he'd keep 
Wojahose from hurtin' on 'em for a spell every 
year. So he froze the lake all over tight every 
winter for two or three months, and then our 
people could go off huntin' and fightin' all over the 
lake without payin' Wojahose. That made him 
mad, an' every little while he'd go roarin' round 
under the ice, tryin' to git out. But he could n't 
do much hurt, only once in a while git a man 
through a hole in the ice. That's the way I've 
heard some of our old men tell it; but I guess it 's a 
story." 



ON A GLASS ROOF 139 

Wojahose has taken more to French customs of 
late years, and feeds now mostly upon horses. 
Not a winter passes that he does not swallow a 
score or so. 

The south wind was blowing softly, and a veil of 
summer-like haze had fallen over the rugged steeps 
of Split Rock Mountain. At its northern point, 
which gives it its name, the sleeping lighthouse 
loomed ghostly through it, awaiting the spring 
evening when it should again awaken and cast the 
glitter of its eye across the released waters. From 
behind this promontory suddenly flashed the sail 
of an ice-boat, swifter than a puff of wind-blown 
smoke, a phantom flying faster than feathered 
wings could bear it, and out of sight behind 
Thompson's Point almost as soon as we had 
seen it. 

The mellow baying of a distant hound came to 
us, and presently we saw the fox creeping out from 
a headland, picking his way along the streaks of 
glare ice till he had got a half-mile from shore, 
when he put his best foot foremost and headed for 
the eastern border of the bay at full speed. When 
the hound came to the scentless ice he gave a long 
howl of disappointment, then circled and snuffed 
in vain, and at last went ashore, stopping now and 
then to cast a wistful glance behind him. 

The day was on the wane, and home at the other 
end of a long walk. I pulled in and wound up my 



140 ON A GLASS ROOF 

guiltless line, dropping the untouched bait to the 
fish or Wojahose, and took the homeward way 
along the shore for a mile, and then up the Little 
River of Otters, for hundreds of years, as now, the 
road of men, fowl, and fish. From it the pickerel- 
fishers had departed, and the only tokens of their 
recent occupancy were the deserted holes, with 
here and there beside one a mangled minnow, a few 
pickerel-scales, half -burned matches, and the ashes 
of pipes. The deadness of winter brooded over the 
lonely icebound stream, and the only sound that 
broke the stillness besides the crunching of my 
footsteps was the storm-foreboding hoot of a great 
horned owl. 

I had almost forgotten to say that I bore home a 
goodly string of fish, and, as no questions were 
asked, I got the credit of catching them. Indeed, 
after a few days, it almost seemed to me that I had 
caught them. 



MERINO SHEEP 

The writer of a recently printed book concerning 
Americans of royal descent, and all such Americans 
as come near to being so graciously favored, has 
neglected to mention certain Americans who are 
descended from the pets of the proudest kings and 
nobles of the Old World. For there is such a family 
here — one so large that it greatly outnumbers all 
American descendants of European royal lines, 
excepting perhaps those of the Green Isle, almost 
as prolific of kings as of Democrats. They carry 
their finely clothed, blue-blooded bodies on four 
legs, for they are the famous American Merino 
sheep. 

The Merino sheep originated in Spain, probably 
two thousand years ago, from a cross of African 
rams with the native ewes, and in course of time 
became established as a distinct breed, with such 
marked characteristics as to differentiate them 
from all other breeds in the world. 

Different provinces had their different strains 
of Merinos, which were like strawberries in that, 
though all were good, some were better than others. 
There were also two great divisions — the Trans- 
humantes or traveling flocks, and the Estantes 
or stationary flocks. The Transhumantes were 



142 MERINO SHEEP 

considered the best, as they had a right to be; for 
their owners were kings, nobles, and rich priests, 
and they had the pick of the fatness of the whole 
land, being pastured on the southern plains in 
winter, and in the spring and summer on the then 
fresher herbage of the mountains to the northward, 
from which they returned in the fall. For the ac- 
commodation of these four or five millions during 
their migrations, cultivators of the intervening 
land were obliged to leave a road, not less than 
ninety yards wide, as well as commons for the feed- 
ing of these flocks — a grievous burden to the hus- 
bandman, and for which there was little or no 
redress. A French writer says: "It was seldom 
that proprietors of land made demands when they 
sustained damage, thinking it better to suffer than 
to contest, when they were assured that the ex- 
pense would greatly exceed any compensation they 
might recover." A Spanish writer complains in a 
memoir addressed to his king, that "the corps of 
junadines (the proprietors of flocks) enjoy an enor- 
mous power, and have not only engrossed all the 
pastures of the kingdom, but have made cultiva- 
tors abandon their most fertile lands; thus they 
have banished the estantes, ruined agriculture, and 
depopulated the country." The Transhumantes 
were in flocks of ten thousand, cared for by fifty 
shepherds, each with a dog, and under the direc- 
tion of a chief. Those who wish to learn more 



MERINO SHEEP 143 

of the management of these flocks and the Hfe 
of their guardians are referred to the interest- 
ing essay on "Sheep," by Robert R. Livingston, 
printed by order of the Legislature of New York 
in 1810. 

Of the travehng sheep were the strains known as 
Escurials, Guadalupes, Paulars, Infantados, Ne- 
grettis, and others, all esteemed for various quali- 
ties, and some of whose names have become famil- 
iar to American ears. The stationary flocks appear 
to have passed away, or at least to have gained no 
renown. 

The Spanish sheep reached their highest ex- 
cellence about the beginning of the nineteenth 
century; but during the Peninsular War the best 
flocks were destroyed or neglected, and the race 
so deteriorated that in 1851 a Vermont breeder 
of Merinos, who went to Spain on purpose to see 
the sheep of that country, wrote that he did not 
see a sheep there for which he would pay freight to 
America, and did not believe they had any of pure 
blood! But Merinos of pure blood had been 
brought into France in the last quarter of the 
eighteenth century, and there carefully and judi- 
ciously bred. In Saxony they were carefully but 
injudiciously bred, everything being sacrificed to 
fineness of fleece. 

Less than one hundred years ago the sheep of 
the United States were the descendants of the 



144 MERINO SHEEP 

English breeds, mixed and intermixed till they had 
lost the distinctive characteristics of their long- 
wooled, well-fleshed ancestors, and were known as 
"natives" (a name they were as much entitled to 
as their owners), being born here of parents who 
had not slept or grazed under other skies. For 
many generations having little care, their best 
shelter in winter being the stacks their poor fodder 
was tossed from, and their fare in summer the 
scant grass among the stumps of the clearings and 
the shaded herbage of the woods, by the survival of 
the fittest they came to be a hardy race, almost as 
wild as deer, and almost as well fitted to withstand 
the rigors of our climate and to elude capture by 
wild beasts or their rightful owners. Indeed, so 
much had they recovered the habits of their re- 
motest ancestors, that to get up the settler's flock 
for washing or shearing, or the draft of a number 
for slaughter or sale, was at least a half-day's task, 
if not one uncertain of fulfillment. All the farm- 
hands, and often the women and children of the 
household, were mustered for these herdings, and 
likely enough the neighbors had to be called in to 
help. The flocks were generally small, and the 
coarse, thin, short wool was mostly worked upon 
the now bygone hand-cards, spinning-wheels, 
and hand-looms for home use. As the clearings 
widened, the flocks of sheep grew larger, and wool- 
growing for market became an industry of some 



MERINO SHEEP 145 

importance. The character of the animals and 
the quality of their fleeces remained almost un- 
changed until the century was a half-score years 
old, when the Merinos had become established 
here, and the effect of their cross with the natives 
began to be manifest. 

Perhaps mention should be made here of the 
Smith's Island sheep, of unknown origin, but 
peculiar to the island from which they took their 
name, which lies off the coast of Virginia, and be- 
longed, about 1810, to Mr. Custis, Washington's 
stepson, who wrote a pamphlet concerning them, 
in which he says: "Their wool is a great deal longer 
than the Spanish, in quality vastly superior; the 
size and figure of the animal admit of no com- 
parison, being highly in favor of the Smith's 
Island." 

Livingston does not endorse these claims, but 
says of the wool: "It is soft, white, and silky, but 
neither so fine nor so soft as the Merino wool." If 
this breed is not extinct, it never gained much 
renown, nor noticeably spread beyond its island 
borders. I think Randall does not mention it in 
his "Practical Shepherd." There were also the 
Otter sheep, said to have originated on some island 
on our eastern coast, and whose distinguishing 
pecuUarity was such extreme shortness of legs that 
Livingston says they could not run or jump, and 
they even walked with some difficulty. And there 



146 MERINO SHEEP 

were the Arlington sheep, derived from stock im- 
ported by Washington, the male a Persian ram, 
the mothers Bakewell ewes. They seem to have 
been a valuable breed of long-wooled sheep, but 
are now unknown. 

The first importation of Merino sheep on record 
is that of William Foster, of Boston, who in 1793 
brought over three from Spain and gave them to a 
friend, who had them killed for mutton, and, if the 
sheep were fat, I doubt not found it good, and 
wished there was more of it. In 1801 four ram 
lanabs were sent to the United States by two 
French gentlemen. The only one that survived 
the passage was owned for several years in New 
York, and afterward founded some excellent grade 
flocks in Delaware. Randall says of him: *'He was 
of fine form, weighed one hundred and thirty-eight 
pounds, and yielded eight and a half pounds of 
brook-washed wool, the heaviest fleece borne by 
any of the early imported Merinos of which I have 
seen any account." 

What was then considered fine form would 
hardly take that place with our modern breeders, 
and the then remarkable weight of wool was not 
more than a quarter that of the fleece of many of 
the present Americans of the race; these last, how- 
ever, not brook-washed nor even rain-washed. The 
next year Mr. Livingston, our Minister to France, 
sent home two pairs of Merinos from the Govern- 



MERINO SHEEP 147 

ment flock of Chalons, and afterward a ram from 
the Rambouillet flocks. 

A table given by Livingston in 1810 is interest- 
ing in showing the effect of the first cross on the 
common or native sheep. The average weight of 
the fleeces of a flock of these was three pounds ten 
ounces; that of the half-bred Merino offspring, five 
pounds one ounce. Similar results came of the 
larger importation, in the same year, by Colonel 
Humphreys, our Minister to Spain, of twenty-one 
rams and seventy ewes, selected from the Infan- 
tado family. In 1809 and 1810 Mr. Jarvis, Ameri- 
can Consul at Lisbon, bought nearly four thousand 
sheep of the confiscated flocks of Spanish nobles, 
all of which were shipped to different ports in the 
United States, and in those years, and the one 
following, from three thousand to five thousand 
Spanish Merinos were imported by other persons. 
In 1809 and 1810 half-blood Merino wool was sold 
for seventy-five cents and full blood for two dol- 
lars a pound, and during the War of 1812 the latter 
sold for two dollars and fifty cents a pound. Natu- 
rally, a Merino fever was engendered, and imported 
and American-born rams of the breed were sold for 
enormous prices, some of Livingston's ram lambs 
for one thousand dollars each. But such a sudden 
downfall followed the Peace of Ghent that, before 
the end of the year 1815, full-blooded sheep were 
sold for one dollar each. 



148 MERINO SHEEP 

Till 1824 the price of wool continued so low 
that, during the intervening years, nearly all the 
full-blood Merino flocks were broken up or care- 
lessly bred. Then the enactment of a tariff favor- 
ing the production of fine wool revived the pros- 
trate industry, and unfortunately brought about 
the introduction of the miserable Saxon Merinos, 
large numbers of which were now imported. In 
the breeding of these, everything having been 
sacrificed to fineness of wool, the result was a 
small, puny animal, bearing two, possibly three, 
pounds of very fine, short wool. Such was the 
craze for these unworthy favorites of the hour that 
almost all owners of Spanish sheep crossed them 
with the Saxon, to the serious injury of their flocks. 
They held the foremost place in America among 
fine-wooled sheep for fifteen or twenty years, and 
then went out of favor, and have now quite dis- 
appeared, I believe. 

The Spanish Merino now came to the front 
again, and of them the descendants of the Jarvis 
and Humphreys importation were most highly 
esteemed. As has been mentioned, the flocks of 
Spain had sadly deteriorated, and the American 
sheep derived from them in their best days far sur- 
passed them, if not their own progenitors. 

Wool-growing became the leading industry of 
the Green Mountain State. Almost every Ver- 
mont farmer was a shepherd, and had his half- 



MERINO SHEEP 149 

hundred or hundreds or thousands of grade sheep 
or full bloods dotting the ferny pastures of the 
hill country or the broad levels of the Champlain 
Valley, rank with English grasses. From old Fort 
Dummer to the Canada line one could hardly get 
beyond the sound of the sheep's bleat unless he 
took to the great woods, and even there he was I 
likely enough to hear the intermittent jingle of a 
sheep-bell chiming with the songs of the hermit 
and wood thrushes, or to meet a flock driven 
clattering over the pebbles of a mountain road; 
for a mid-wood settler had his little herd of sheep, 
to which he gave in summer the freedom of the 
woods, and which took — alas for the owner's 
crops — the freedom of the meadow and grain 
patches, and were sheltered from the chill of win- 
ter nights in a frame barn bigger than their mas- 
ter's log house. 

In June, when the May-yeaned lambs were 
skipping in the sunshine that had warmed the 
pools and streams till the bullfrogs had their 
voices in tune, the sheep were gathered from the 
pastures and driven over the dusty roads to the 
pens beside the pools on the tapped mill-flumes 
and washed amid a pother of rushing waters, 
shouts of laughter of men and boys, and discord- 
ant, plaintive bleats of parted ewes and lambs. 

A fortnight or so later came the great event of 
the shepherd's year, the shearing, for which great 



150 MERINO SHEEP 

preparation was made within house and barn. 
The best the farm afforded must be provided for 
the furnishing of the table; for the shearers were 
not ordinary farm laborers, but mostly farmers 
and farmers' sons, and as well to do as their em- 
ployer, who was likely enough to shear, in his turn, 
for them. Whoever possessed the skill of shearing 
a sheep thought it not beneath him to ply his well- 
paid handicraft in all the country round. For 
these the fatted calf was killed and the green peas 
and strawberries were picked. The barn floor and 
its overhanging scaffolds were carefully swept, 
the stables were littered with clean straw, the 
wool-bench was set up, and the reel full of twine 
was made ready in its place. Those were merry 
days in the old gray barns that were not too fine 
to have swallows' holes in their gables, moss on 
their shingles, and a fringe of hemp, mayweed, 
and smart weed about their jagged underpinning. 
There was jesting and the telling of merry tales 
from morning till night, and bursts of laughter 
that scared the swallows out of the cobwebbed 
roof -peak and the sitting hen from her nest in the 
left-over haymow. Neighbors called to get a 
taste of the fun and the cider, to see how the flock 
"evridged," and to engage hands for their own 
shearing. At nooning, after the grand dinner, 
while the older men napped on the floor, wool- 
bench, or scaffold, with their heads pillowed on 



MERINO SHEEP 151 

soft places, the young fellows had trials of 
strength at "pulling stick" or lifting "stiff legs.'* 
The skillful wool-tier was rarer than the skillful 
shearer, and in much demand in his own and 
neighboring townships. He tied the fleeces quickly 
and compactly, showing the best on the outside, 
but with no clod of dirty locks in the middle; for 
in those days wool had its place and dirt its place, 
but the fleece was not their common place. The 
catcher was a humble but not unimportant mem- 
ber of the force. He must be alert and with a sheep 
ready for each shearer as wanted, and was never 
to take up a sheep by the wool, but with his left 
arm underneath, just behind the fore legs, and his 
right hand grasping a hind leg. And there was 
the boy to pick up locks, discarding the dirty 
ones, which were swept outdoors. One's back 
aches as he remembers this unpleasant duty of his 
boyhood, when he was scoffed by shearers and 
scolded by the wool-tier, and often had the added 
labor of carrying the wool to its storage. Four- 
teen fleeces tied up in a blanket was the load, 
which, if they had been of nowadays weight, would 
have burdened a strong man; but a five-pound 
fleece was a heavy one then. I have never 
been present at one of the modern public shear- 
ings, which come before the swallows do, while 
winter is still skirmishing with spring, and are 
celebrated in the local papers; but I doubt if they 



152 MERINO SHEEP 

are such hearty and enjoyable seasons as the old- 
fashioned shearings were. 

The wool-buyers scoured the country at or 
after shearing-time, and drove their bargains 
with the farmers. The small lots of wool were 
hauled in bulk to some central point of shipment, 
while the larger clips were sacked on the grower's 
premises. The sack was suspended through a 
hole of its own diameter in an upper floor and 
a few fleeces were thrown in, when the packer 
lowered himself into it and placed and trod the 
wool as it was passed to him till he had trod his 
way to the top. Then the sacks were lowered, 
sewed, weighed, marked, and went their way to 
market. 

The "tag-locks" and pulled wool were mostly 
worked up in the neighboring small factories into 
stocking-yarn, flannel, and blankets for the farm- 
er's use, and into the then somewhat famous 
"Vermont gray," which was the common cold- 
weather outer clothing of New England male 
farm-folk. Readers of Thoreau will remember 
that he mentions it more than once, and thought 
it good enough wear for him. The Yankee farmer 
wore it "to mill an' to meetin'," and the young 
men of forty years ago were not ashamed to appear 
in such sheep's clothing at the paring bee or the 
ball. 

Vermont, become so famous as a wool-produc- 



MERINO SHEEP 153 

ing State that English cutlers stamped their best 
shears "True Vermonters," presently became 
more famous as the nursery of improvement of the 
Merino breed, to which object several intelligent 
breeders devoted their ejfforts. By selection of the 
best of the animals obtainable, the form of the 
sheep was made more robust, the size increased, 
and with it the length and thickness of all parts 
of the fleece, so that the wool on a sheep's belly 
was nearly as long as that on the sides. 

French Merinos, so much changed, since the 
importations by Livingston, from the fashion of 
their Spanish ancestors that they had become a 
distinct family, were introduced, and had their 
admirers, as had the Silesian Merinos. These 
modern French sheep were larger and coarser 
than the original Spaniards; the Silesians, smaller 
than the French, but handsomer and hardier. 

As naturally as in former times, a "Merino 
fever" again began to rage; fabulous prices were 
paid for sheep, and men mortgaged their farms to 
become possessors of a score of full bloods. There 
was no registry of flocks, and jockeys sold grade 
sheep, numbered, lampblacked, and oiled up to 
the desired blackness and greasiness, for full bloods 
at prices tenfold beyond their real worth. Grow- 
ers ran to the opposite extreme from that to which 
they had gone during the Saxon craze, and now so 
sacrificed everything to weight of fleece that Ver- 



154 MERINO SHEEP 

mont wool fell into the evil repute of being filthy 
stuff, more grease and dirt than honest fiber. The 
tide ebbed again to lowest watermark; again the 
inheritors of the blue blood of the Paulars and In- 
fantados went to the shambles at the prices paid 
for the meanest plebeian natives, and it seemed 
as if the sheep-farming of Vermont had got its 
death-blow. 

Even so had the farming of sheep for wool; for 
in the great West a vast region had been opened 
wherein sheep could be kept at such a fraction of 
the cost entailed in winter-burdened New Eng- 
land that there was nothing for the Yankee wool- 
grower but to give up the losing fight. So most 
shepherds turned dairymen. 

But, gifted with a wise foresight, a few owners 
of fine flocks kept them and bred them as care- 
fully as ever, and in the fullness of time were richly 
rewarded. After a while it became evident that 
the flocks of the West could only be kept up to the 
desired standard by frequent infusions of the East- 
ern blood; and so it has come about that sheep- 
breeding in Vermont is a greater, stronger-founded, 
and more prosperous industry than ever before. 
Each year more and more buyers come from Texas, 
California, Colorado, and Australia; and on many 
an unpretending Vermont farm, after examination 
of points and pedigree, often more carefully kept 
than their owner's, the horn-coroneted dons of 



MERINO SHEEP 155 

the fold change masters at prices rivaling those of 
blood horses. 

The care given these high-bred, fine-wooled 
sheep is a wonderful contrast to the little re- 
ceived by flocks in the times when wool-growing 
was the chief object of our sheep farmers; when, 
though sheep had good and abundant food, and 
fairly comfortable shelter from cold and storm, 
they had nothing more. The lambs were dropped 
in May after the ewes were turned out to grass, 
and were not looked after oftener than once a day 
in fine weather, and got only their mother's milk, 
if the ewe was a good milker and was fond enough 
of her ungainly yeanling to own it and give it such 
care as sheep give their young. Now the dons and 
doiias of blue blood have better quarters in winter 
than many a poor mortal, in barns so warm that 
water will not freeze in them, and are fed grain 
and roots as well as hay, and are sheltered from 
even soft summer rains, that their raiment may 
suffer no loss of color. The lambs are brought 
forth when spring has nothing in Vermont of that 
season but the name, and are fed with cow's milk, 
or put to nurse with coarse- wooled foster-mothers, 
more bountiful milkers than Merinos, and have a 
man to care for them night and day. The old-time 
rams tilted it out on the field of honor, to the sore 
bruising of heads and battering of helmets, and 
sometimes loss of life. But now rams of a warlike 



156 MERINO SHEEP 

turn are hooded like falcons, that they may do 
no harm to each other and their peaceable com- 
rades. A blow might cost their owner a thousand 
dollars. 

The successful sheep-breeder is up to his knees 
in clover, but the eastern wool-grower is on barren 
ground. A friend who lives in the heart of the 
Vermont sheep-breeding region writes me: "Or- 
dinary rams sell for from ten dollars to twenty- 
five dollars a head; ordinary ewes for twenty dol- 
lars. The highest real price any one has known a 
ram to sell for within two years, eleven hundred 
dollars; the same for ewes, three hundred dollars. 
The wool of these sheep sells for twenty cents a 
pound. The wool itseK does not pay for growing 
in the way in which these sheep are reared and 
cared for. The wool is a secondary object; the 
bodies are what they are bred for. ... In the way 
sheep are kept on the large ranches southwest and 
west, the sheep so soon deteriorate that they are 
obliged to have thorough-bred rams to keep up 
their flocks. This is particularly the case in warm 
climates. Nature gets rid of the superfluous cloth- 
ing as soon as possible." 

It is interesting to compare the portraits of the 
best Merinos of eighty years ago with the improved 
American Merinos of the present day, and see 
what a change has been wrought in the race with- 
out change of blood. It is not unhkely that to the 



MERINO SHEEP 157 

uneducated eye the more natural and picturesque 
sheep of the old time would seem more comely 
than the bewrinkled, enfolded and aproned prod- 
uct of the many years of careful breeding. As a 
thing of beauty the modern Merino ram can hardly 
be called a success, but there are millions in this 
knight of the Golden Fleece. 



A LITTLE BEAVER 

When you first see the beaver you are likely to 
feel that you already have some slight acquaintance 
with him, and then, searching your memory, you 
will probably find you have been thinking of the 
muskrat. Indeed, the animals have many points 
of resemblance, and except that the muskrat's 
tail is narrower, and longer in proportion, he is 
an excellent miniature portrait of his bigger and 
more valuable cousin, the beaver. 

The hirsute face of the muskrat, grim with its 
small, deep-set eyes and grinning incisors, his 
long, brown, shining fur and soft under-coat of 
drab, his scaly shanks and webbed feet, his whole 
rounded clumsy form make a faithful reproduction 
in small of the larger animal. On land both have 
the same awkward, waddling gait ; in the more con- 
genial element both swim with the same rapid, 
even stroke, and dive with equal startling, light- 
ning-like rapidity. The muskrat builds for a sea- 
son's use a neat and comfortable house, but it pro- 
vides no entrance, such as there is in the beaver's 
domicile, for the carrying in and out of food. The 
muskrat does not, like the beaver, lay up a store of 
winter food, but lives from paw to mouth. How- 
ever, like the beaver's lodge, the muskrat's house 



A LITTLE BEAVER 159 

has a burrow in the bank, as a retreat for use in 
various emergencies. 

Among these are the attacks of man and wild 
animals, and the rise of water. For the muskrat 
has not the sagacity in forecasting the seasons 
which many attribute to him. When he builds the 
walls of his house thin the winter is as likely as not 
to be unusually cold. If he builds his dome low 
and squat, the fall floods will probably drive him 
to his burrow in the bank; but still the second- 
hand prophets do not lose faith in him. 

The muskrat is not a builder of dams, but rather 
a destroyer of them. He will avail himself of the 
ponds they create, but he has so little compre- 
hension of their purpose that he will undermine 
them with his burrows. Then some fine afternoon 
he will awake to find the pond has run away, and 
left nothing in its place but a mud flat with a thin 
stream meandering through; and he will wonder at 
the cause of the disaster. After faring sumptuously 
for a few days on the stranded dying mussels, he 
will journey in quest of fresh under- water pastures. 

As there are hermit beavers, so there are hermit 
muskrats, disappointed or misanthropic old fellows, 
who seek seclusion from their kind in some remote 
pool or small brook. Here the hermit lives in com- 
parative safety from his worst enemy, man, gather- 
ing generous subsistence in summer from the sedges 
of the waterside and the green things of fields, the 



160 A LITTLE BEAVER 

corn bordering the brook, and the root-crop. But 
his solitary Hfe does not exempt him from danger. 
When he makes nightly foraging incursions inland 
the prowling fox may catch his scent drifting on 
the breeze, and come stealthily up-wind upon 
him; or the great horned owl may swoop down 
out of the silence of the night. 

At home the muskrat is not secure from his in- 
veterate enemy, the mink, whose slender, snake- 
like body finds easy entrance into his burrow. 

With winter come short commons, scant glean- 
ings of water-plant roots on the bottom, and long 
overland tours of exploration, when perhaps a 
meal-barrel in a hog-house is discovered, or, by 
greater good fortune, secret entry to a cellar is 
made, and great store of succulent vegetables come 
at. But it is likelier that hunger and thirst neces- 
sitate a return to wider waters. The marsh-bor- 
dered streams, with their slow, smooth currents, 
their steady rise and fall of water, their broad 
meadows of innumerable aquatic plants and great 
beds of fat lily-roots, are the proper and appointed 
abiding-places of the muskrats. Here is abundant 
material for house-building, no current to interfere 
with the building, or to chafe and wear the house 
away; and here there is an inexhaustible supply of 
vegetable and animal food. 

When the waning of summer is calendared by 
the bloom of goldenrod and aster on the upland, 



A LITTLE BEAVER 161 

and when cardinal-flowers and ripened water- 
maples kindle rival flames on the inner border of 
the marsh, the winter dwelling of the muskrat is 
builded unseen in the darkness. Night by night 
grows the dome of fresh green rushes, broad- 
leaved flags, angular-stalked sedges; and it is 
hardly noticeable among the green, rank standing 
plants until the thatch has grown dun with curing. 
Swift-winged teal alight there, and the great dusky 
ducks climb to the housetop for outlook over the 
marsh, but rarely except at night is the owner to 
be seen. He is both lake-dweller and cave-dweller, 
and between his two unlike habitations communi- 
cation is had by a hidden path in the tangle of 
weeds, a pitfall for the unwary wader of the marsh. 
With the completion of the house, a new danger 
threatens the builders and their young family. 

The mink and the owl have harassed the nightly 
labors and waylaid the lop-eared youngsters who 
made short excursions from the paternal roof; 
but now of a dew-silvered morning a knotted wisp 
of sedge or rushes or a patch of birch bark calls 
your attention to a "tally-stick," which secures a 
cruel trap. This has been set perhaps in the crumb- 
littered feed-bed outside the house, or even in the 
darkness of the inner chamber, to which the trapper 
has gained access by removing a bit of the wall, 
now neatly replaced. 

Only spendthrift trappers follow this wasteful 



162 A LITTLE BEAVER 

practice, but they carry it on in fall and winter, 
especially in the latter season, when the ice facili- 
tates travel over the marsh. 

At these seasons men go quietly among the 
muskrat-houses, armed with one-tined spears, 
which they drive with such accuracy that they 
rarely fail to strike the inner chamber and almost 
always impale one victim, and oftener two. 

The direst calamity that can befall the muskrat 
occurs when, at a low stage of water, extremely 
cold weather freezes the marsh to the bottom and 
cuts the animals off from the supply of aquatic 
roots. Whole families starve in the houses; a few 
dig their way to the outer world and wander far 
and wide over the snowy waste in quest of food, per- 
haps to find some meager fare, but more probably 
to perish by starvation or violence. In their eager 
quest for water, they sometimes gnaw through 
lead pipes, and so work a deal of mischief. 

But there are always some who survive all the 
dangers that beset them, and see the beauty of 
spring again unfold upon the earth. Then the sun- 
lit, open water invites them to freedom and boun- 
teous fare, and their untenanted houses go adrift, 
in wrack and ruin, on the wide overflow of the 
spring flood. The scattered remnant of siu'vivors 
coast along the low shores in quest of mates, whin- 
ing a plaintive call as they ply their noiseless pad- 
dles. A traveler tells of hearing a cry which he mis- 



A LITTLE BEAVER 163 

took for that of a baby, but discovered to be the 
plaint of a tame beaver, which was being abused 
by some Indian children. So we may conclude 
that the muskrat and beaver have another point of 
resemblance in their voices. 

Having found mates, as have the garrulous 
blackbirds in the trees above them, the ducks 
splashing into the water beside them, and the 
bitterns making nuptial rejoicing from drowsy 
sun-bathed coves, they begin to increase and mul- 
tiply their kind. In a few favoring seasons the 
marshes are again populous with furry inhabitants, 
and the conical huts are thick along the border 
of the channel in autumn. It is wonderful how 
through all the years the muskrats maintain their 
numbers, for they are not sagacious or shy of man; 
indeed, they frequently establish themselves in 
close neighborhood to him, and make little at- 
tempt at concealment. They blunder carelessly 
into traps, and do not understand the danger signal 
of human scent. 

A writer on natural history tells us, in illustra- 
tion of these animals' sagacity, that in swimming 
from place to place to escape detection they will 
cover their heads with a green twig held in their 
mouths. As a matter of fact, however, this is sim- 
ply their mode of carrying food to their burrows, 
and usually their burdens do not conceal their 
heads at all, but trail beside or behind them. 



164 A LITTLE BEAVER 

When alarmed, the muskrat dives quick as a 
flash, and swims far and well under water before 
breaking the surface for air; and this seems to be 
his only idea of escaping from danger. 

The secret of the persistent holding out of the 
muskrat against the persecution of natural enemies 
and the relentless pursuit by man lies in its fecun- 
dity, its hardiness, its easy adaptation to changed 
conditions, and the abundance of food supplied by 
every stream in which water-plants grow and the 
fresh- water mussel lives. Long may the tribe en- 
dure to give a touch of wild life to our tamed 
streams. 



TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 

Much talking of old times is one of the signs of old 
age, as common an accompaniment of it as gray 
hairs, toothless jaws, dimmed eyes, and stiffened 
joints, though a far pleasanter one. The weary 
mind clings more tenaciously to pleasant memories 
of youth than to fleeting, trivial incidents of yes- 
terday. The old man longs to live them over again 
in story, and his tongue would fain be wagging. 
To that end he must have an audience. Young 
folks will serve if interested to hear of the days 
when the woods were populous with game, and the 
clear, shaded streams swarmed with fish that were 
not always lost. Better by far is some old com- 
rade, a good listener, yet breaking in now and then 
with a reminder of some half-forgotten incident of 
the happy, care-free days. An old friend, an old 
pipe and an open fire — happy combination to 
bring out talk of old times. 

" Do you remember the spring we went to Bur- 
ton's Pond? " a familiar voice asks out of the cloud 
of tobacco smoke. Yes, and how we were enticed 
there by the marvelous tales told of swarms of 
muskrats, told us by one without regard for truth, 
when we were looking about for trapping-grounds. 
We could trap up Little Otter as far as it would 



166 TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 

float our boats, and then carry them over to the 
pond, make a camp there, and trap for a week, and 
then come home to enjoy our fortunes at leisure. 
Besides the money that was in it, there would be 
lots of fun, and so, having gained parental con- 
sent and parental aid in the shape of provisions — 
for, though grown-up, we were not of age — we 
three set forth on our expedition in two boats. 

We embarked a little above the second falls, 
Joe and I in his boat, and By in his, paddling and 
poling at a leisurely rate, setting a trap at every 
likely sign, whether burrow, feed-bed, or nightly 
haunted log or tussock, and so on, as far as could 
be properly gone over next day. On the way up 
each boat kept its allotted side, never intruding on 
the other, but on the downstream course it was 
"go as you please," as fast as current and paddle 
would bear us, with an eye out for a chance shot at 
a swimming rat. The trapping here, when water 
rose and fell several inches in the course of the day 
and night, was very different from that in the 
marshy lower creek, where there was little varia- 
tion in the rise and fall of the sluggish current, and 
a trap remained nearly at the same depth at which 
it was set. 

Next morning we voyaged upstream again, tak- 
ing up traps and catch till we reached the end of 
yesterday's voyage, where we began setting until 
we came to rapids so swift and rough that we had 



TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 167 

all we could do to make headway. Then slack- 
water and "sign" for a few more traps up to the 
torn water of Dover Rapids, the busy scene of 
many manufactures in old times, all deserted now 
and silent but for the rush of the rapids and the 
roar of the cataract, no vestige left but a rusted 
shaft, a broken wheel, a grass-grown embankment 
— memorials of departed industries and dead 
hopes. 

We lugged and dragged our boats and cargoes 
around the falls and launched them again in slack 
water, reaching in lazy loops to the site of the old 
Boston Iron Company's forges. A little below it 
we rounded a long bend half encircling the Old 
Indian Garden, where they say was an Indian 
cornfield. There was a more authentic memorial 
of times almost as old in the venerable tree, li"\ang 
and standing with a deep notch cut in it with the 
plain marks of a beaver's teeth. An old man, a 
son of the first settler at this place, told me that 
the last trout of Little Otter were caught here, and 
were plenty enough in his father's day, but I never 
found any one old enough to remember seeing a 
beaver. Hard by on the flats of Mud Creek was 
a great haunt of these animals, long ago trapped 
to extermination by Iroquois and Waubanakee 
and adventurous white fur-hunters. The levels 
were flooded by dams that can still be traced, and 
ditching the alluvial soil brings to light a pave- 



168 TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 

ment of peeled sticks, the tooth-marks as distinct 
as when first made, but crumbhng to pieces after 
brief exposure. 

Here, where the old company's throbbing ham- 
mers incessantly shook the forest sixty years ago, 
a roaring rapid compelled another toilsome carry, 
happily the last awaiting us in these waters. Now 
it was easy navigating the slow current. The 
meadows on a level with our eyes were growing 
green in the pleasant April weather that touched 
us with the comfortable indolence of spring fever, 
as it seemed to touch the crow lazily hunting grubs 
on the broad intervale, and the blackbirds oozing 
a gurgle of melody and discord from the elms 
above us. 

A woodchuck waddling along the bank pros- 
pecting for the earliest clover fools us into stalking 
him for a muskrat until he takes alarm and scurries 
into his burrow with a derisive whistle. We came 
head to head above the banks of a bend with 
a great blue heron that sprang to flight with a 
startled croak, and frightened a pair of dusky 
ducks, startling us in turn with sudden splash 
and flutter, and taking new fright at the sight of 
our boats. Doubtless the pair were in quest of a 
secluded summer home where they might rear 
their annual brood of ducklings in peace, and we 
hoped our brief intrusion might not change their 
plans, which gave promise of sport the coming fall. 



TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 169 

When the well-named hillock, Hedgehog Hill, 
bristled far behind us, the creek narrowed to a 
channel that barely gave passage to our boats, and 
our voyage came to an end where a short bridge 
spanned it. 

A team met us, and loading our boats on to the 
wagon went lumbering and bumping over the 
rough-dried clay highway toward our destination. 
Happily escaping shipwreck on this dried sea of 
mud, we came to a bright little torrent of cascades 
and rapids, which we rightly guessed to be the 
outlet of our pond, then saw the gable of a sawmill 
peeping over the top of the hill, and then came to 
its hospitable door, the whole open side gaping a 
welcome to customers and their logs. Even so long 
ago the old-fashioned "up-and-down" sawmill had 
been almost entirely superseded by the modern 
circular saw, and we lingered a little while to re- 
fresh our earliest recollections with watching the 
automatic movements of this relic of old times. It 
was as interesting to us, grown up, if not so 
wonderful to us, as when callow urchins, to see the 
keen saw gnawing its gradual way steadily through 
the log, tossing up jets of sawdust till the carriage 
tripped the gate lever, and the machinery creaked 
to a slow halt; then, in obedience to the push of a 
lever, the carriage trundled the log back to its 
first position, the leaping saw attacked it, and 
again gnawed through it. ' What a wonder it must 



170 TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 

have been when it came to push aside the clumsy 
old pit saw and its two attendants, the name of one 
of whom, the pitman, was fitly appropriated by 
one of its parts! 

We were not looking at the mill all this while 
without more than half an eye to the pond, nor 
without some disappointment. There it lay, clear 
and bright in the April sun, but sorely disfigured 
by the dead, drowned trees that stood around and 
knee-deep in it, and among which its upper end 
was lost, for it was an artificial pond, made by 
throwing a dam across a wooded dell, and so of 
course killing all the flooded trees. Some were 
evergreens and some deciduous, and all were ugly 
in dead nakedness. Beyond, we could hear the 
brook brawling its way down the mountain, a 
stream once populous with trout and not yet 
quite Ashless, so a kingfisher proclaimed, mapping 
an aerial tracing of its course, with continuous 
clatter. Some bunches of driftweed lodged among 
tree trunks that might be debris of ruined muskrat 
houses, and a modest display of sign on a floating 
log gave evidence of the presence of muskrat s. A 
clumsy scow with a broken trap and a tally stick 
lying in the bottom, grounded on the bank near the 
bulkhead of the flume, showed a rival at hand. 

Pulling our boats into the water, we began ex- 
ploring the pond, keeping an eye out for a good 
place for a camp. The shores were low and damp. 



TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 171 

and we could not see anywhere from the water a 
place at all to our liking. We found promising 
places for a few traps, and having set them became 
aware that it was time to search in earnest for a 
night's lodging. The sawyer gave us a flat refusal 
when we asked for a chance to spread our buffalo 
skins on the kitchen floor. Evidently he did not 
look kindly upon our invasion of his domain, 
though we had been told that no one trapped here 
and the rats were going to waste, dying of old age. 
However, he afterward came to be on trading 
terms, furnishing us with some articles that we 
found ourselves in need of. Among them I re- 
member some dip candles which were the most re- 
markable triumphs of the chandler's art we had 
ever seen. We called them self-supporting wicks, 
for it was a marvel how a limp, loosely twisted 
cotton cord could stand with such a thin casing of 
tallow. But they fitted our kind of sconce — a 
split stick — much better than larger ones would 
have done. We were making up our minds to be 
thankful for tramps' quarters if we could find a 
hospitable haymow; but just then we fell in with a 
cousin of By's, whose family lived in the neighbor- 
hood, and having heard of our presence there had 
sent him in search of us to invite us home. It was 
all right for By to accept the proffered hospitality 
of his relatives, but Joe and I were strangers, and 
it was rather awkward to crowd ourselves in. But 



172 TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 

hunger and weariness overcame our scruples, and 
our hospitable entertainers soon made us forget 
we were strangers wearing mud-stained clothes. 
In the course of the evening chat around the 
kitchen stove we were told of a tenantless log 
house in the neighborhood of the pond that might 
serve our purpose as a camp if we could get the 
consent of its owner. 

Accordingly, the next morning I was delegated 
to interview him. I found him at work in an ad- 
jacent field, a man with a pleasant face that prom- 
ised a favorable answer, which was cheerfully given 
when he was assured that we had no evil designs 
on the community. The old house had one room, 
doorless and windowless, and without a fireplace, 
though there was a chimney built from the cham- 
ber floor with a pipe hole in the bottom for the ac- 
commodation of a stove. We set to work to make 
the most of this by building a primitive fireplace, 
consisting of a quantity of clay mud spread di- 
rectly beneath the chimney and covered with flat 
stones embedded in it to bring them to an even 
surface. Upon this we could make enough fire to 
do a little very plain cooking, afford a little warmth 
and a great deal of smoke, some of which crawled 
up the chimney after the room was completely 
filled. During the smokiest progress of building the 
fire we lay prone upon the floor, breathing a little 
and weeping much until the worst was over and 



TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 173 

we could crouch around our hearthstones to frizzle 
a slice of salt pork or warm ourselves. 

We had the luck to find a two-inch plank on the 
premises, which we set edgewise in a corner at a 
proper distance from one wall, then filled the space 
with straw purchased of the sawyer, and spreading 
the buffalo skins on top we were furnished with a 
luxurious bed. The door being gone, we boarded 
up its place permanently, using the window hole 
for ingress and egress, tacking up some boards to 
keep out the weather when we were in for the night. 

Our arrangements for beginning housekeeping 
being completed, we made the first round of our 
traps. The result was not encouraging; the water 
had risen with the shutting down of the mill gate, 
covering almost every trap so deep that they were 
untouched. We made allowance for this rise when 
resetting, and had better luck, but were at no 
time overburdened with skinning and stretching 
skins, for the place was not overstocked with rats, 
and we had convincing proof that toll was regu- 
larly taken out of our light catch. The navigation 
was a continual vexation by reason of stumps just 
under water, on which a boat would snag itself 
with a graceful ease that was the poetry of motion, 
and pivot thereon in exasperating response to our 
futile efforts to get her off with the bottom out of 
sounding by paddle or oar, and nothing within 
reach to push against. 



174 TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 

When we got there, there was pleasant seclu- 
sion at the upper end of the pond, paled in by the 
ragged gray trees, where the shallow water was 
fretted by the ripples of the incoming brook, whose 
silvern babble came from the mountain dell along 
with the boisterous cackle of a log-cock. Some tiny 
minnows, which it pleased us to believe were trout, 
flashed to and fro across the golden-barred bottom, 
as the basking frogs cut short their lazy croaking 
and splashed into the water at our approach. 

There was no resisting the spell of the indolent 
atmosphere that the April sun distilled, and step- 
ping ashore we went back out of the desolation of 
drowned trees to living woods and loafed our fill 
on moss-cushioned logs. When the day and what 
we called its work were done, and the long shadows 
widened into twilight, we climbed in at our win- 
dow, nailed up the boards behind us, illuminated 
our quarters with a couple of the sawyer's dips, 
"one to see the other by," Joe said, and lighted a 
fire on the hearth. After enduring a half-hour of 
smoky torment, we were rewarded with a bed of 
coals, over which we roasted some choice quarters 
of the most carefully dressed muskrats, or frizzled 
slices of salt pork, and if inclined to extreme luxury, 
toasted our brown bread. With sharp-set appetites 
and raw onions for sauce, we would not have ex- 
changed our supper for the President's. 

After it the pipes and quiet enjoyment of smoke 



TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 175 

that was not torment, and a recapitulation of the 
day's fun and vexations, of which the first formed 
the greater part, and then yawning to bed and 
sound sleep — always but once. 

A warm south wind blew a thick covering of 
clouds over the sky, that grew thicker and more 
lowering and portentous of a long rain storm. The 
threatening weather sent us to our quarters early, 
for our poor facilities for drying wet clothes made 
us dread a wetting. We were scarcely housed 
before the first drops fell in an intermittent pat- 
ter, quickly increasing to a wind-blown downpour 
that made us thankful for the sound roof over us. 
From end to end of the eaves a broad cataract fell 
and ran in a noisy, rushing brook to join another 
larger one in the highway ditch. 

I could imagine the women of former households 
sallying forth on such occasions to put in order the 
always-delayed corner barrel to catch water for an 
infrequent washing, then scurrying in bedraggled 
and dripping, while the lazy men folk unconcern- 
edly smoked by the greasy stove. 

One could tell by the looks of the place, though 
so long uninhabited, that such was the class of 
its tenants. The marks of shiftlessness and dis- 
comfort were indelibly set upon it. Not even a 
stunted cherry tree nor sprawling unpruned cur- 
rant bush grew near; no dry stalks of chance-sown 
poppy, pink or four-o'-clock betokened the former 



176 TRAPPING UP XITTLE OTTER 

presence of a posy bed; and what was once by cour- 
tesy called a garden was a waste of dry weed stalks, 
pitted with scars of old potato hills. 

As we peeped out across it through the crannies 
of the logs, we saw the columns of scud sweeping 
across the blank gray background from south to 
north, then change the direction of their march to 
the east until we heard the slanted drift of rain 
beating against the western gable. The air began 
to have a creeping chilliness upon which our smoky 
fire made as little impression as the glow of our 
pipes, and it grew more creepy and benumbing 
when the rain beat on the northern slant of the roof 
and then subsided to the slushy splash of wet snow. 
At last we were driven to the poverty-stricken 
extremity of going to bed to keep warm, when Joe 
declared that his back "felt as if he was list'nin* 
to a good scarey panther story when the critter 's 
jest goin' to jump," and I am sure mine was as if 
the panther was in the chamber. 

For awhile we dozed in a half -comfortable state, 
but the cold increased beyond the capacity of our 
buffaloes and straw to ward off, while the north 
wind shrieked with a keener blast after every lull. 
We spent the dreary night in turning over and 
over, giving one side a chance to thaw a little 
while the other slowly froze. We needed no alarm 
to get us up in the morning, but were up when the 
first level rays of the sun shining from a clear sky 



TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 177 

came through the crevices of the logs. It shone 
upon a tranquil, frozen world. The windless woods 
and crisp, dun herbage, just sprinkled with snow 
of the storm's finale, glittered as if set with in- 
numerable gems. 

We crawled out into the sunlight and tried to 
absorb some of it, apparently with less success 
than a brave little song sparrow that sang his 
cheery lay from the top of a fence stake. We were 
not quite in the mood of singing, though we man- 
aged to crack some jokes over the night's misery, 
and counted it a part of the fun of our trip. 

It was dismal work going the rounds of the traps, 
breaking ice to get to some, resetting in the icy 
water and getting little for our trouble, as the 
night's flood raised the water beyond our ordinary 
calculations. 

A few days later the catch became so light that 
we decided to leave, and so engaging a team to 
transport our boats to the head of navigation, we 
bade farewell to our humble abode and Burton's 
Pond — a long farewell, for I never saw either 
again, and both have long since departed this 
world. We were probably the last tenants of the 
old house, which not long after went to the wood 
pile and the sawmill, and when the mill had de- 
voured all the available woods in its neighborhood 
it was abandoned, the dam went to ruin and the 
pond ran away. Where it was a little brook crawls 



178 TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 

among new alder thickets, and if a muskrat dwells 
there, it is only some solitary hermit who has 
wandered far from his fellows in search of a safer 
and quieter retreat. 

I have heard of the place two or three times 
in connection with enormous blacksnakes which 
were seen there by people passing on the highway. 
A friend of mine killed one which measured eight 
feet in length. I do not know whether these 
snakes were the common water snake which is fre- 
quent in all our waters, though rarely so large, or 
the blacksnake common enough south of us, but 
almost unknown here. Fortunately for our peace 
of mind. Burton's Pond had not gained a snaky 
reputation at the time of our brief sojourn, in 
which case it might have been briefer. 

Getting our boats afloat at the place of our pre- 
vious debarkation, with nothing to detain us, we 
voyaged merrily down the narrow stream, now 
with newly turned-out kine staring at the strange 
apparition of bodiless human heads gliding past, 
now disturbing again our old acquaintances — 
the heron, the ducks and the woodchucks — and 
so after a little to the head of the long rapids above 
the old forge of the Boston Company. Joe and I 
ran our boat ashore without a thought of running 
the rapids, for though they were smooth enough 
at the head, white water showed below and there 
was an ominous roar that threatened danger. By 



TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 179 

came dashing past, answering to our earnest re- 
monstrances that "He'd risk it," and shot into the 
swift, smooth water Uke an arrow. 

I watched him a moment, and then, as he seemed 
to be getting through safely, went about setting a 
mink trap in what looked to be a likely place in 
the base of a hollow tree. When not long so en- 
gaged, I was startled by a loud outcry of distress, 
*' Rowlan' ! Come quick ! Come quick ! " and tear- 
ing along the bank at the best pace my long legs 
would compass, I presently discovered our too 
adventurous comrade perched on top of a big 
boulder in the middle of the roaring current, hold- 
ing aloft in one hand his dinner pail, in the other 
his precious bundle of furs, while just below lay 
his capsized boat, jammed fast against a rock, and 
gun, traps, and hatchet somewhere at the bottom. 
Joe arrived directly, and on finding that our friend 
was unhurt and no great harm done, we could not 
withhold a hearty laugh at the funny figure he 
cut with his carefully preserved treasures. We 
helped him ashore with them, and soon fished up 
the gun, traps, and other cargo, but our united 
efforts could not budge the boat an inch, nor could 
it be done until the creek had fallen considerably. 

As there was no telling when a team would come 
for boats and traps, we insured the safety of the 
latter by caching them with a skill that would do 
no discredit to a Rocky Mountain trapper. We 



180 TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 

removed a circular sod and excavated the earth 
to a sufficient depth, carrying away the loose dirt 
and throwing it in the creek, so that when the pit 
was done its precincts were as neat as a chipmunk's 
dooryard. Then the traps were closely packed in 
it, the sod adjusted in its original place so nicely 
that nothing but the searchlight of a thunderbolt 
could have revealed what was hidden there. 

I once saw where a lightning stroke unearthed a 
log chain that had lain buried at the foot of a tree 
for unknown years, the electric current furrowing 
the turf and laying bare every contortion of the 
chain from end to end, just as it had been dropped 
from some careless hand. 

Our traps were buried, our trapping ended, to 
little purpose save living very close to Nature and 
primitive life, sometimes almost to the verge of 
discomfort, though scarcely counted so by us. We 
fed on the coarsest fare with the zest of healthy ap- 
petites, slept soundly on the rudest beds, were sun- 
tanned and smoke-tanned to the color and odor of 
Indian-tanned buckskin, were unkempt and be- 
grimed to the wonder and disgust of the good home 
folk who could not understand what we could find 
that was pleasant in such a life. We knew, if we 
could not tell them. 

Good souls, they never thought of their an- 
cestors living far harder lives but yesterday in the 



TRAPPING UP LITTLE OTTER 181 

world's age, only the hardiest surviving and pre- 
serving the vigor to perpetuate their race, nor 
did the good souls ever think the race would be 
none the worse now for a judicious infusion of old 
leaven of rough living. Some wisely do so; some 
foolishly play at it, because it is the fashion. I 
never could see what good or satisfaction there 
can be in camping out in an elegantly furnished 
house, where you are expected to dress for the 
luxuriously served dinner of several courses, and 
gossip, lawn tennis and golf are the chief recrea- 
tions; or perchance a young lady catches a fish or 
fires a rifle in the direction of a target, she cele- 
brates the unique event with a pretty squeal. 
There is nothing of the wholesomeness of true 
camp life in it all, none of its freedom from con- 
ventionalities, of the invention of makeshifts, no 
living close to the heart of nature. 

Well, there are no more of the happy, care-free 
days of camping out for us three comrades — one 
sleeping his long sleep under the sumacs in the old 
burying ground; one other is a man of affairs, too 
busy to go camping; and the other bed-ridden, 
shut in from the bright and beautiful world by a 
wall of perpetual night. What wonder that he 
loves to babble of the days when the joy of be- 
holding the beauty of the world was his. For him 
is only the inward sight to read the pages of mem- 
ory whereon the record of things seen long ago is 
written in the story of youth. 



THE BOY 



I. TAKE THE BOY 



It is a hopeful indication for the future of field 
sports that in several recent papers by sportsmen 
the boy accompanies the father in his recreations, 
to the pleasure and advantage of both. 

The graybeard thrills with the delight of long- 
ago youth if his boy shows a quick eye and wit and 
a hand prompt to obey both. He is as pleased and 
proud as the youngster himself, if the son gets 
bird, beast, or fish skillfully and honorably. With 
this quick imitator by his side, he grows punctil- 
ious in observing every law laid down by man or by 
nature concerning the game he seeks, that he may 
teach by his practice a reverence for such laws 
and an obedience to them. The "pocket pistol,'* 
too, is left behind, if it ever before was thought an 
essential part of the refreshments. 

From too great familiarity, or from the oppress- 
ing cares that added years often lay upon the elder 
(and that will not stay behind), if unaccompanied 
by this quick observer, he would pass unnoticed 
many objects of interest and beauty — here a wood 
duck preened her plumage and left a many-hued 
feather on the log for token; a water lily, late 
blooming, gleams under an overhanging water 



THE BOY 183 

maple; a hawk circles the far-oiff hilltop; or on a 
yellow birch a vireo has swung her birch-bark 
basket; a fox has left a chicken's bone or turkey's 
feather on the gray rock where he feasted the 
night before; a woodcock has twice bored the black 
mud by the wood road bridge. 

To the boy such companionship brings number- 
less benefits. One of the best is the surprised feel- 
ing swelling his breast and beaming in his face of 
the comradeship implied. 

He learns so pleasantly safe and legitimate 
methods of sportsmanship, that he will not forget 
to practice them in coming years. For him there 
will be no careless handling of the gun, no fool- 
hardy feat attempted on the water, no fingerlings 
in his creel nor unlawful game in his bag. 

He learns to love the woods, as by his father's 
side he steals silently over their sunny slopes to 
surprise a partridge; or as he stands by him, with 
finger on trigger and heart in throat, under birch 
or hemlock in October sunshine, listening to the 
nearing bugles of the hounds. So, in like manner, 
he loves the grass-bordered brook, from whose 
pools the trout leaps to his father's skillful cast, 
and the broader streams, where bass and salmon 
play. And mingled with this love of nature and 
her healthful recreations, there grows a stronger 
filial affection, not likely to grow less as the years 
increase. 



184 THE BOY 

II. THE BOY AND THE GUN 

The boy, bless his heart, is closer to Nature than 
the man. He is a savage in civilized attire; he steals 
and lies without a blush of shame, persecutes and 
domineers, and delights in noise and destruction, 
and will do and dare anything to satisfy his un- 
tamed cravings. To make an uproar and kill 
something nothing quite so well serves him as 
gunpowder, and for its employment nothing 
serves him so well as the gun. 

Boys have grown particular of these later years, 
as have the grown-up savages on the frontier, and 
must have breech-loaders and "ca'tridges"; but 
when we graybeards were boys any tube of iron 
with a lock and stock was a prize. No matter how 
it missed fire, kicked or scattered, when it did go 
off you felt it as well as heard it, and it would 
sometimes kill a chipmunk or a robin, and so 
frighten a woodchuck that after one shotted salute 
from it he would keep his hole for half a day. What 
a big Injun was the boy who owned or had bor- 
rowed such a gun, and how all the other boys 
gathered about him to watch the mysterious proc- 
ess of loading. What a wise fellow was this to 
know that he must first put in the powder, and how 
much of it, and on top of it a wad of tow or wasp- 
nest or newspaper, and then the death-dealing 
pellets of precious shot poured out of a vial, and 



THE BOY 185 

then more wadding. Then came the grand final 
art of priming. It was thrilling to see him place a 
G.D. cap between his teeth while he covered the 
box and returned it to his pocket, then cock the 
piece and put the cap on the nipple. What if his 
thumb should slip from the striker as he eased it 
down ! Sometimes it did, and then what a delight- 
ful scare if nothing worse; what shame for the 
unskillful engineer amid the jeers of the envious, 
gunless crowd. 

But nowadays, alas, almost any boy may have 
a gun, and only he is enviable who has the best. 
Well, if he will only use his dangerous toy as he 
should, let him have it, for the sporting mstinct is 
strong in the young savage. And who for pure 
love of it is such a naturalist? Is it not he who 
notes the first comers of spring, meets the chip- 
munk and the woodchuck at their thresholds when 
they first come forth from their winter sleep; finds 
the earliest birds' nests, and knows where the 
squirrels breed? The sportsman who enjoys his 
sport most is he who loves nature best; and who 
of all the guild enjoys his day with the gun with 
greater zest than the boy? 

Yes, let the boy have his gun, a sound, well- 
made one, but teach him how to use it — carefully, 
temperately, humanely. Always as if it were 
loaded, never out of season, nor too often in sea- 
son, and never for mere love of slaughter. 



186 THE BOY 

m. THE BOY AND THE ANGLE 

Not solely for the scientific angler with his eight- 
ounce rod, silken line, and flies cunningly fashioned 
to resemble no living thing, are all and the chief est 
delights of the gentle pastime. There is one of 
humble estate in the brotherhood of the angle who 
makes no pretensions to skill, and uses the most 
uncouth and coarsest tackle, to whom it yields 
supremest enjoyment. He never cast a fly, and 
knows no " green drake " but him of the duck pond, 
no "doctor" but the village practitioner who gives 
him an occasional nauseous dose, no "professor'* 
but the "deestrict** schoolmaster, and if he ever 
heard of a split bamboo, thinks a spUt pole must 
be a poor stick to catch fish with. He wants no 
reel to wind in his fish with, but "yanks'* them 
out and lands them high and dry and safe from 
return to the flood, casting them the length of 
pole and line behind him. This is, of course, our 
young and unsophisticated friend, the boy of the 
country, he who remains a boy till he has grown 
big enough to go a-fishing, and perhaps never be- 
comes a young gentleman, but keeps a boy's heart 
within him, and a boy's ways until he becomes a 
man. He does not always wear a torn hat, nor 
always trousers in which he feels most at ease if 
sitting down when big girls are about, nor does he 
always go barefoot from spring till fall, though he 



THE BOY 187 

likes to give his naked soles a taste of the soil for a 
few days when he has seen the necessary seventeen 
butterflies. 

Furthermore, we do not claim for him, nor does 
he for himself, that he can catch more fish than 
the scientific angler; but how he loves to go a- 
fishin', and how he enjoys it all, from the prepara- 
tive beginning to the very end ! What happiness is 
his in the cutting of the pole in the always-pleas- 
ant woods, where many a sapling is critically 
scanned and many a one laid low before the right 
and foreordained one is found; and in the buying 
of the ten-cent line and half dozen beautiful blue 
fish-hooks, selected with much deliberation from 
the tempting array in the showcase of the country 
store. How continually is he full of anticipation of 
sport from the moment he begins digging his bait; 
each big worm unearthed and going into the leaky 
coffee-pot promises a fish, and as he hurries across 
the fields to the stream he cannot stop even to 
look for a bird's nest, though sparrow, bobohnk, 
and meadow lark start from almost at his feet. 
Nor hardly can he halt to disentangle his hook and 
line from the fence or bush they are seen to catch 
in, for he knows the fish are waiting for him. Then 
out of breath beside the stream he impales a lively 
worm, spits on it, not so much for luck as in def- 
erence to time-honored usage, gets his line straight 
out behind him, and sends it with a whiz and a re- 



188 THE BOY 

sounding "plung!" of the two-ounce sinker far 
out into the waters, and waits for a bite with what 
patience a boy can muster. Presently perhaps the 
expected thrill runs up his angle to his hands and 
through all his nerves, the tip of the pole nods, 
then bows low to the flood, and by no "turn of the 
wrist," but by main strength and by one and the 
same motion he hooks his victim and tears it from 
its watery hold. So swiftly has it made its curved 
flight over his head, unseen but as a dissolving 
streak, that he knows not till he has rushed to 
where it is kicking the grass whether his prize is a 
green-and-golden-barred perch, a gaudy-mottled 
pumpkin-seed, a silvery shiner or an ugly but 
toothsome bullpout, gritting his wide jaws when 
his horns do him no good, though they may yet do 
his captor a mischief. 

Whatever it may be, he gloats over it as much 
as any man over his well-fought trout or bass, and 
straightway runs to cut a forked wand whereon 
to string it, and takes care that it be long enough 
to hold many another. If the fish do not bite he 
sets his pole in a crotched stick and lets it fish for 
itself while he explores the shore and catches a 
"mud turcle," "almost" kills a "mush rat" or 
scares himself with a big water snake. 

Returning to his pole, perhaps he finds the 
tip under water and tugs out a writhing eel, the 
wild fun and horror, and the abominable, all- 



THE BOY 189 

pervading sliminess of whose final capture makes 
memorable the hour and the day thereof. Perhaps 
a hungry and not too fastidious pickerel or pike- 
perch or bass may gorge the worm-indued hook 
and be hauled ashore, and then the measure of the 
boy's glory is filled and the capacity of his trousers 
to contain him tried to the utmost. 

Though he goes home with a beggarly account 
of small fry dangling at the end of his withe, he is 
unabashed, if not proud, and hopeful for another 
day. But if it is strung so full that his arms ache 
with lugging it, what pride fills his heart as he dis- 
plays his fish ! Till they are eaten and digested he 
ceases to be a "no-account boy." He cleans them 
and enjoys it. Every scale is a cent, bright from 
the mint, and he catches each fish over again as 
he takes it up. He recognizes his worms in their 
maws. When they are cooked, whoever tasted 
fish so good? 

The boy is no more a contemplative angler than 
he is a gentle one, and he does not of choice go 
fishing alone. He would rather go with the re- 
nowned old fisherman of the neighborhood and 
learn something of the mysteries of his art, but 
that worthy does not overmuch desire the com- 
panionship of youthful anglers. So perforce the 
young fisherman goes with another boy and has 
some one to "holler" to, compare notes with, 
and enter into rivalry with, and he can say with 



190 THE BOY 

truth, when he gets home, "Me and Jim ketched 
twenty ! " though he forgets to add that Jim caught 
nineteen of them. Wherefore not? Do not his 
biggers and betters brag of scores which would not 
have been made if their guides and oarsmen had 
not fished? 

Alack, for the bygone days ! When May comes 
with south winds and soft skies and the green 
fields are dotted with the gold of dandelions and 
patched with the blue of violets, and the bobo- 
links are riotous with song over them, who would 
not be a boy again just for one day to go a-fishing? 



THE COUNTRY DOCTORS 

Out at all hours of day and night, pelted by storms 
of rain and storms of snow, chilled by bitter cold 
of winter and scorched by downright beams of the 
summer sun, our country doctor leads a hard and 
wearing life. He rides over roads now heavy with 
mire, now blocked with snow, now choking with 
dust. With body so overworked and mind per- 
plexed by diflScult cases and the worry of un- 
reasoning and exacting patients, it is a wonder how 
he preserves health and strength without his own 
physic, or maintains a cheerful spirit, yet he does 
both. 

In an obscure corner of his office you may dis- 
cover a gun, a rod and a box of fishing tackle, 
none too carefully kept, yet all serviceable and 
ready for use in their season; and these constitute 
his private medicine chest, with judicious draughts 
wherefrom he preserves the health and vigor of 
body and mind. 

Sometimes when you meet him on his way to 
visit a distant patient of the continually ailing sort, 
the gun shares with him the narrow seat of the 
sulky, unskillfully masked under a blanket, or the 
red case rests between his knees, and you guess his 
* Dr. Willard of Vergennes. 



192 THE COUNTRY DOCTOR 

intention of stealing an hour's shooting in some 
patch of roadside woods, or as much fishing in the 
stream that intersects his route. The entire days of 
such recreation that fall to his lot, lie far apart in 
the year. 

It often happens when a day of freedom has ap- 
parently come, it slips away from him into the un- 
certainties of the future. Shells are loaded over 
night, the gun cleaned and oiled, or the rod put in 
order, tackle overhauled, flies arranged or bait 
secured. He falls asleep with a prayer for an 
auspicious morrow, to dream pleasant dreams of 
frost-painted woodlands or waters rippled by the 
south wind's breath and shadowless beneath a 
clouded sky. The slow dawn brings an answer to 
his prayer, and his dreams seem about to material- 
ize into tangible realities. His horse is at the door, 
his gun or rod in hand, his heart is light with 
the thought of throwing physic to the dogs for a 
day, when in rushes a messenger with an urgent 
call to some serious case. 

In an instant the promised day of recreation is 
changed to one of wearing toil and anxiety. He 
meets the disappointment with a cheerful face 
and takes up the scarcely dropped burden of care 
without a murmur. Indeed he has grown so ac- 
customed to such miscarriage of his plans that he 
is least disappointed when most so, and hope 
deferred does not make his stout heart sick. 



THE COUNTRY DOCTOR 193 

He comes home weary and worn at night, but 
drops in at the shoemaker's and refreshes himself 
with a half hour's chat of reminiscent or pro- 
spective shooting or fishing. He finds the musty 
atmosphere of the cobbler's den congenial, and his 
visits are so frequent that the neighbors have 
ceased to ask him if the shoemaker is ailing. The 
mending of bodies and the mending of soles, not- 
withstanding their dissimilarity, seems to bring 
the practitioners of the two arts into an affinity 
which leads both to field sports and scientific pur- 
suits more than any other professors and crafts- 
men. 

When at last a day arrives that leaves the doctor 
free to practice the lighter arts of recreation, with 
what zest for them and entire abandonment of 
weightier duties he enters upon them. The facul- 
ties sharpened in his regular profession are keen in 
the pursuit of these, and sensitive to every touch 
of nature. He enjoys to the utmost her beauties, 
discovers her secrets, and acquaints himself with 
the lives of her children, the wood folk and water 
folk whom he loves, that have grown dearer 
through continual longing and rare opportunity. 

Far apart in the years of his professional life he 
breaks the links of the lengthening chain, and es- 
capes into the great woods beyond the recall by 
night-bell, messenger, or telegram. His comrades 
tell how he revels in his brief season of liberty. 



194 THE COUNTRY DOCTOR 

when he is the life of the party, the ready deviser 
of expedients, the inventor of camp conveniences, 
the closest observer of nature, the keenest and yet 
the gentlest of sportsmen. 

He is the better doctor for being a good sports- 
man, and his patients have no cause to blame him 
for deserting them, for he brings back to their serv- 
ice a clearer brain, firmer nerves, and a stronger 
body. 



PORTRAITS IN INK 

I. THE FARMER 

A FARMER finds his best recreation in the woods 
and waters, with gun and rod, in the few respites 
that are given him from the toil whereby he con- 
quers a hvelihood from the soil. 

There is a break in the dull round of labor when 
planting is done and hoeing time not yet come, 
when he goes a-fishing after his own fashion, and 
he deems the day the less ill spent if he bring home 
a catch that serves to break the monotonous fare 
of a farmer's table. Then there are days in haying 
when he follows the time-honored advice, "When 
it rains too hard to work, go a-fishing," for he can- 
not choose his days, only make the most of such as 
come to him. The day laborers that he hires have 
a freer choice than he, between work and pastime, 
and while he toils in the sun, he sees the gentleman 
angler and the market-fisherman plying their rods 
on his own stream, and hears the guns untimely 
thinning the broods of woodcock in his own alder 
copses. 

Of a summer Sunday he strolls out to the wood- 
side pasture and watches a fox and her cubs at 
play about the threshold of their underground 
home, or if he fears the raid of some bounty- 



196 PORTRAITS IN INK 

hunter or vengeful poultry breeder, he gives the 
vixen an unmistakable hint to move to safer quar- 
ters. If her Thanksgiving antedates his by two 
months or more, he overlooks the mistake in the 
calendar and forgives the venal sin for the sake 
of future sport and possible expiation in the days 
of the sere and yellow leaf, days that shall bring 
more leisure to himself and freedom to the old 
hound, now yawning and whining in the leash at 
home. 

When haying and harvesting are over, he robs 
less exacting labor of an occasional day to prowl 
along a willowy stream beloved of wood duck or 
to crawl in the sedgy borders of the haunts of 
dusky duck and teal, or he makes his stealthy way 
in the constant shade of wood roads and forest 
by-paths and ferny margins of the woods, where 
the yet unbroken flocks of grouse are likely to 
be, and if he stalks two or three wary birds and 
brings them to pocket from tree or ground, or from 
the air by rare chance, or gets one raking shot at a 
logful of sleeping wood ducks, or into a huddle of 
shy duskies, or a passing flock of swift-winged teal, 
he counts it a good day's sport, with tangible and 
suflficient proof thereof. But if he has none of the 
rewards, the fatigues of the day are rest from toil 
and care, and so not unrequited. 

In the later days of the year, when woods are in 
the fading gray of autumn, or winter has overlaid 



PORTRAITS IN INK 197 

the russet with white, he ranges upland and low- 
land with hound and gun, hunting foxes, matching 
his knowledge against their cunning, and he is 
thankful to be the winner, but not cast down if 
he is the loser in the game. If he kills the fox, he 
thriftily saves the skin, and prizes it the more if it 
is prime and marketable. 

He is friendly and generous to sportsmen who 
meet him in a like spirit, but not over-hospitable 
to such who only make a convenience of him, his 
home and hunting grounds. The first sportsman 
in the land does not observe close seasons more re- 
ligiously than this jealous guardian of nesting and 
immature birds, of fox cubs and all young fur- 
bearers, yet he will not be converted to the belief 
that it is unsportsmanlike or unfair, in proper 
season, to shoot a fox before hounds, or stalk a 
sitting grouse, or catch a trout with a worm, all 
of which he does, not only without compunction 
but with absolute satisfaction. 

He is a close and intelligent observer of nature, 
and freely imparts to congenial listeners what he 
learns of her secrets; but concerning his love of her 
he is as reticent as of the love of his sweetheart. 
For all expression in words, you would imagine 
that her infinitude of beauties are displayed in 
vain to him in all moods and seasons, yet his tell- 
tale face informs you how they satisfy his soul 
and fill his heart with unwritten, wordless poetry. 



198 PORTRAITS IN INK 

II. THE TRAPPER 

Bill, the trapper, is a figure so out of place in the 
midst of the civiHzation that has swept away for- 
ests and game, that you almost wonder if he is not 
an Indian who happened to be born with a white 
skin, fair hair and blue eyes, or a pioneer hunter 
who drank at the fountain of youth in middle age 
and so has been preserved since the old wild days 
when the unmeasured wilderness stretched out into 
unknown lands and sheltered countless game. He 
has many of their traits, many of the qualifications 
that would fit him to live their lives amid their be- 
fitting surroundings; and is as out of place as they 
would be in this latter-day tameness of men and 
nature. 

His tall, spare form, full of inert vigor and 
strength, clad in garments that befit his calling 
and that bear odorous witness of it, shacking 
leisurely among restless, busy men, on whose in- 
cessant bustle he casts wondering eyes alert 
through all their dreaminess, is as incongruous 
here as would be a becurled dandy in the heart of 
the wilderness. 

He has that instinct, or sixth sense, possessed by 
few except Indians and dumb animals, which en- 
ables him to make his way to any desired point 
without any apparent guidance, though, save of 
dark night, he has little use for it in these narrow 



PORTRAITS IN INK 199 

and many pathed woodlands. He treads their 
rustling carpet as silently as a panther, the sere 
leaves do not stir, nor the dry twigs snap beneath 
his feet and the bent boughs sway to their places 
behind him without a sound. You are not aware of 
his coming till he appears before you like an ap- 
parition, nor of his going but as you watch him 
like one dissolving in the shadows of the woods. 

His casual glances discover things which are not 
revealed to directed gaze, and he translates rec- 
ords that you cannot read. Where you see only a 
knot or wisp of brown leaves, he discovers the bird 
under the grouse's disguise of movelessness; on 
what is to you only a blank page, he reads the 
story of some remote or recent presence or pas- 
sage. 

He knows every kind of tree and its varieties, 
all the medicinal and poisonous plants by odd and 
homely names that often have a tang of folk lore 
or hint of forgotten use; and it is as instructive as 
a professor's discourse on natural history to hear 
him talk of the habits of wild things, for all his 
quaint superstitions concern some of them. You 
could find no arguments to shake his firm belief 
that eels are generated in mussels or that skunks 
have power to absorb their own spent effluence, nor 
do you care to. 

He would not kill a nesting partridge or trap an 
unprime fur-bearer, yet he holds all legislative 



200 PORTRAITS IN INK 

protection of game and fish to be an infringement 
on his rights, and is as cunning as a fox in persist- 
ent violation of all such statutes. All wild things 
are his by natural inheritance, and what does a 
week or month matter, and whose affair is it if he 
desires fish, flesh, or fowl to-day? 

He is somewhat conceited and boastful and en- 
vious of another's renown in his craft, to be fore- 
most in which is his highest ambition. You confess 
it is a poor ambition to be most skillful in a trade 
that is obsolete and unrequited. With a slightly 
different bent, with one omitted trait, he would 
have had a higher aim and have been an Audubon 
or Thoreau, performing useful if ill-paid work, 
making a name honorably remembered. 

As he is what he is, he slouches into old age and 
down to his last sod-roofed shanty, a shiftless, lazy, 
good-natured, disreputable old trapper, hunter 
and fisherman, and only by a few will he be kindly 
and briefly remembered. 

Yet as you see him stealing through the second 
growth woods, tame and puny successors of the 
wild, majestic forests, or plying the noiseless pad- 
dle of his skiff in the nakedness of a shrunken 
stream, he is so like a lingering spirit of the old 
days that you are thankful for the picturesque 
figure which gives one touch of remote half-savage 
past to the commonplace present. 



PORTRAITS IN INK 201 

III. THE SHOEMAKER 

The old shoemaker, grizzled, unkempt, slovenly 
clad, warped with many years over last and lap- 
stone, is a cheerful philosopher as he labors or 
meditates in his untidy shop. 

There among the clutter of leather scraps, worn 
footgear and lasts, with the battered old gun in 
the corner beside the worn rod whose term of 
service is still extended by many bonds of waxed 
ends, you may sit at your ease or your peril on 
the rough little counter or on one of the half dozen 
rickety chairs, weak but hospitable even in the 
decrepitude of age. You will find genial compan- 
ionship and get more useful information in an 
hour spent with this unassuming craftsman than 
in a day with more pretentious sportsmen. 

It is not altogether greed for fish and game that 
entices him abroad in the few days wherein are 
conjoined an allurement of propitious weather 
and slackness of work. He admits with a laugh at 
himself, that he killed nothing in his last day's 
outing, but asserts that he had nevertheless a 
right good time. He got a fortnight's kinks out 
of his back and shoulders, a heartening smell of the 
woods, a feast of fresh air, and caught some of the 
wood folk at a new trick or uttering a heretofore 
unheard or unrecognized note, or he has seen some 
strange freak of nature. If you are interested, he 



202 PORTRAITS IN INK 

imparts to you his small discoveries, a poor but 
hospitable host sharing his meager fare with a 
hungry wayfarer. 

You may find him just returned from a stolen 
half-day's excursion, rejoicing over a lucky shot, 
never claiming it to be more, and he relates with 
the particulars of circumstance and place, the 
finding of his grouse and how he brought it down, 
as it whirred and clattered almost unseen in the 
haze of brush. When you desire a sight of the 
finest bird he ever killed, he bashfully confesses 
that he left it at a sick neighbor's on his way home 
(a mile out of it though), but as he knew the sick 
man would not care he stuck one of the tail feathers 
in his hat, and this he displays with great satis- 
faction. He sticks it up on the wall beside the 
dried head of a big bass and the plumy tail of a 
gray squirrel, and you know by the far-away look 
in his eyes that it will need but a glance at these 
when the days of toil are long unbroken to conjure 
up the pleasant, restful loneliness of the woods, the 
glint of clear waters and the music of their voices. 

He does not consort much with men in his out- 
ings, but of choice with boys, whom he delights to 
instruct in woodcraft and the mysteries of the 
gentle art. He baits the small boys' hooks with 
infinite care and unhooks the horned pouts and 
thorny-backed perch for them, untangles lines 
and recovers snagged hooks for them; he mends the 



PORTRAITS IN INK 203 

big boys, tackle, is uncle to them all and rejoices in 
their luck as if it were his own. 

As you listen to his kindly and interested dis- 
course concerning the wild world and its sports 
that he so unaffectedly loves, and look at the 
homely, genial face in setting of grizzled hair and 
beard, beaming with genuine enthusiasm, you 
realize that it needs something more than learned 
talk of high-bred dogs, fine guns and fancy tackle, 
or the possession of them, to make a true sports- 
man, for here is one in patched raiment and leather 
apron, who scarcely knows a pointer from a setter, 
nor ever owned a high-priced gun or rod, and yet 
is a true sportsman in the best sense of that 
abused title, for he is an ardent lover of honest 
sport, appreciating something in its achievements 
beyond skillful slaughter and the making of heavy 
scores. Is it not a privilege to have the confidence 
of this honest man and to associate with this sim- 
ple and enthusiastic lover of nature? 

IV. THE ANTICIPATOR 

If all sportsmen were like our harmless friend, 
game might live a quiet hfe and die of old age, 
while its human enemies were getting ready for a 
campaign against it. 

Even though it makes you impatient, you can- 
not help being amused by the fuss of his constant 
preparation, nor fail to be warmed by his steady 



204 PORTRAITS IN INK 

enthusiasm that burns on and on Hke a slow- 
match, which never fires the mine of action. 

What careful selection of guns, what labor of 
tinkering and cleaning them, what cautious pur- 
chasing of a new one and endless testing of its 
qualities, what thoughtful study of ammunition 
and close measurement of charges, what nice ad- 
justment of all appurtenances go on while the 
season draws near, endures and is gone. 

Then at once with unabated zeal he begins 
planning for the next, and refurnishing his equip- 
ments, targeting his guns, wearing them out with 
innocuous use. So his year passes in a round of 
pleasant anticipation and free of vain regret. 

Once in its course, perhaps, he is betrayed into 
going shooting while yet unready. Your report of 
the abundance of squirrels, his favorite game, in 
your neighborhood, gets the prompt response of a 
promise to come in a day or two for a raid on them. 
During the week or a fortnight that await its ful- 
fillment the woods are overrun by a horde of gun- 
ners, and every squirrel is killed or made alive to 
its own safety. 

At last, late in the afternoon of the last day, 
your friend arrives with a wagon load of guns and 
equipments, whereof nine tenths are quite un- 
necessary. When he has made a studious selection 
from his embarrassment of riches, you go forth 
with him in the propitious last hour of sunlight. 



PORTRAITS IN INK 205 

You are so fortunate as to accomplish stealthy 
approach to a squirrel that, unconscious of danger, 
sits rasping a nut on a hickory branch, and as a 
courteous host should, you signal your guest to 
take the easy shot. 

Slowly unlimbering his gun from under his arm, 
while he calculates the distance, he cautiously 
raises the weapon to its deadly aim. You hold 
your breath in expectancy breathless; but if you 
held it till he fired, you would have no further use 
for it. 

A busy spider runs out to the steadfast muzzle 
and cables it to the ground with a silver thread. 
The squirrel turns his nut, half eaten, to begin on 
the other side, and suddenly becomes aware of 
enemies. Down drops the nut with raspings of 
shuck and shell, and up goes the squirrel behind 
the sheltering trunk, then out upon the further 
branches, and so goes plunging and scampering 
through upper byways in swift retreat to the heart 
of the woods. 

Without lowering his gun, the dilatory marks- 
man turns an almost triumphant face toward you, 
as who should say, "If he had not moved his fate 
was sealed.'* 

He never risks a shot at running or flying game. 
You would as soon think of an oyster snatching 
its prey as of him shooting on the wing. If his 
game will not wait, it may go unscathed. 



206 PORTRAITS IN INK 

When the delayed opportunity arrives, he is as 
little exalted by success as cast down by failure, 
and calmly accepts good fortune with quiet thank- 
fulness. 

Whether he bears home a light or heavy bag, he 
seems never to be weighted with the burden of 
disappointment nor to be troubled with jealousy, 
while you can but envy his constant pleasure of 
anticipation, his sure enjoyment of participation. 

Happy old man, long may he potter in endless 
preparation, long continue his meandering in the 
woods, a rarely harmful foe to all their denizens. 

V. A PROFESSOR OF FISHING 

Whenever you may chance to visit his haunts, in 
almost all weathers and seasons, you are likely 
to meet the old fisherman, wearing dilapidated 
clothes and bearing unconventional equipments. 
Robins are not yet mating, nor the plovers call- 
ing in the tawny grass lands, before he is stealing 
along the brimming trout brooks, or is discovered 
on the flood-invaded river bank, in sun and shower 
and flurry of sugar-snow, so silent and so seldom 
moving, that the uninterrupted purr of the frogs 
arises from the drift of dead water- weeds close be- 
side him, and the turtles bask undisturbed on the 
nearest log, the muskrat swims beneath the stead- 
fast slant of his pole, and the wild duck whistles 
past him in unerring flight. 



PORTRAITS IN INK 207 

He is alert for the first sharp-set trout and 
tempts the hungry perch and bullhead with the 
earliest worm. No flies are looped about his 
shapeless, battered hat, no fly-book in his pocket, 
for he scorns all such gimcracks as he does reel and 
jointed rod. 

A pole that only nature has had a hand in mak- 
ing, save in trimming, is good enough for him, and 
so is an honest bait that in no wise deceives but in 
concealing a hook. 

Only when it comes to trolling has he departed 
from the ancient usage of pork rind and red flannel 
and become a late convert to modern metallic 
lures. 

All day long, with the stout line held in his 
teeth, he trails the fluttering spoon along marshy 
margins and rocky shores, impelling his craft with 
slow oars or dextrous paddle, lazily laborious, 
always expectant, never excited by good luck, nor 
ever cast down by bad. 

He fishes solely for fish, never for sport. In 
spearing and netting suckers when they come up 
stream to spawn and in hauling his seine when 
the law allows it, he has as much sport as in an- 
gling. If the pickerel, perch, and smelt bite well, 
he apparently enjoys ice-fishing, with its cold and 
desolate environment, quite as much as casting 
his bait in open waters under softer skies. 

He wastes no time on the fine arts of the craft, 



208 PORTRAITS IN INK 

but brings each fast-hooked fish to boat or grass 
with short shrift, whether it be plebeian pickerel, 
eel, and pout, or patrician trout and bass. 

Despise him not in the day of small things, for 
out of the abundance of his store many a light creel 
has become heavy, and blank scores been made 
reputable, to the credit of rods and flies quite in- 
nocent of piscine blood. Also, it is well to remem- 
ber that if he is somewhat greedy, there are those 
no less so, who profess to be truer anglers than he. 

If he is touched by the fine and subtle influences 
of nature, if he rejoices in the gladness of the birds, 
the beauty of the flowers, the greenness of woods 
and fields, the babble of waters, the glory of dawn 
and sunset, he makes no sign. Yet he is a close ob- 
server of what concerns his business, wise in the 
manners and moods of fishes, and whoever studies 
nature in any of her ways must in some sort be her 
lover. 

He has the quaintness and originality that 
flavor men who live much by themselves and think 
their own thoughts, and if you approach him with- 
out assumption of superiority, you will find him 
an entertaining and profitable companion. 



SMALL SHOT 

I. SOME POOR men's RICHES 

There are many who have inherited the hunting 
instinct and were born too late to find game enough 
in the region of their birth to make hunting worth 
while for the game that can be got by the most 
persistent seeking, and who have not inherited 
wealth, nor the faculty of acquiring it, so that they 
may go for a week, month, or year, to places where 
game is still abundant. Some of these sometimes 
wonder whether this inheritance, come down to 
them through a thousand generations from wild 
ancestors, is not under such conditions an entailed 
ill-fortune, a wholesome desire, given without the 
opportunity of satisfying it, a purse of gold that 
one must always carry but never spend. 

Most assuredly it is an unprofitable dower if it 
leads one to too continual pursuit of what at best 
he can get but little of, mere game. But if it takes 
him to the woods and fields for that reasonable 
share of recreation which belongs of right to all, 
rather than to questionable pastimes among ill- 
assorted associates, then it is something to be 
thankful for. With a gun to excuse his day's out- 
ing he goes forth. His wits are sharpened to find 
the haunts of the infrequent woodcock or quail or 



210 SMALL SHOT 

grouse, that should rightfully be in the swamp, or 
field, or copse that of old their tribes possessed. 
All these places he must search, and study how 
changed conditions have wrought changes in the 
habits of the few survivors. The wits of these, too, 
are sharpened. The woodcock does not wait till 
the dog's nose is almost above him before he springs 
up with a twittering whistle, but flushes wild, and 
alights afar off. The scant bevy of quail goes off 
out of gunshot in a gray flurry to the mazes of the 
woods. The ruffed grouse tarries not to cry "quit ! 
quit!" nor strut along the dim aisles of his wood- 
land sanctuary, but hurtles away unseen, almost 
out of ear shot. If by good luck one of these falls 
to the unaccustomed aim, if a woodcock tumbles 
in a shower of leaves to the ferny carpet of the 
swamp, if a quail drops to the earth out of a whiff of 
feathers, if a grouse slants from his arrowy flight 
and strikes with a fluttering thud upon the fallen 
leaves, or a woodduck, started from a willowy bend 
of the river, splashes back into it before the powder 
smoke has unveiled him, the heart is warmed with 
a thrill of the satisfaction of well-doing. 

Without even this appeasing of the sportsman's 
gentle bloodthirst, there is more and better to be 
got of a day's wandering with the helping bur- 
den of a gun. The companionship of Nature, the 
eavesdropping and spying to catch her secrets, the 
studying of the ways of all the little wood people, 



SMALL SHOT 211 

not worth, or inestimably more than worth, pow- 
der and shot. Who has ever heard the last word 
the jay has to tell him in her many voices? Who 
has tired of visiting with the chickadees, or of 
watching the nuthatches creeping headlong down 
the mossy tree trunks, or the squirrels' saucy 
tricks, or the ways of strange woods plants grow- 
ing and blowing and seeding, and the odd freaks of 
trees' growths, and no end of things that he would 
never have heard or seen if it had not been for this 
wooden and iron excuse that he lugs about with 
him? Thanks be to its first inventor, in spite of all 
the woeful mischief it has TVTOught. How many 
happy days it has gone to the making of, from boy- 
hood to old age, in the lives of those who love it. 
What a comfort is the ownership of a good gun, 
though one seldom shoots it. What a pleasure its 
owner has in those seasons when it cannot be 
otherwise used, in putting it in order for the days 
fondly looked forward to — days when the woods 
have put on their last and bravest attire of the 
year — days when they have cast it off and all 
the landscape is veiled in the gray haze of Indian 
summer, and days when all the fields and frozen 
waters are white with the first snows and the wild 
music of the hounds stirs the woods. 

When these days have come and gone and win- 
ter winds are howling, who so much as he, born to 
the love of field sports with small opportunity of 



212 SMALL SHOT 

enjoying them, delights to read by his cheerful 
fireside what others more fortunate have written 
of their outings, and to share with them in spirit 
the happy hours in camps by wild lakes, the tramps 
in primeval forests, and hunting tours in far-away 
lands that he may never see. 

II. THE OLD GUN 

It is not to be denied that there is great satisfac- 
tion in being the owner of a fine new gun. The 
perfect result of the handicraft of a master of the 
art of gunmaking; a piece so nicely balanced that 
it will almost take the hne of flight of the swiftest 
flying bird of its own mere motion; all its parts so 
neatly fitted that a spider's web inserted might 
cause a jam; its polished and gracefully turned 
stock, the chosen bit of many a goodly tree; the 
variegated barrels almost as beautiful to look upon 
in their regular irregularity as a golden and purple 
barred sunset sky, or the shimmer of a rippled 
lake. It is a delight to the eye to see, to the hand to 
hold, a satisfaction to the soul to feel that one is 
the possessor of such a weapon. And yet, like 
riches, and like love, it has its cares, anxieties, and 
jealousies. One dislikes to be caught in the rain 
with such a gun in its untarnished beauty, or to 
take it out under threatening skies, or to breast 
haphazard blackberry briars with it in hand; to 
leave it at night uncleaned, though the day's 



SMALL SHOT 213 

tramp has been a weary one, and all one's muscles 
and bones cry out for rest. One's richer neighbor 
may have a costlier gun, hence a pang of unchris- 
tian envy, and the breaking of a holy command- 
ment, all for a stock and a bit of iron. 

Not these frets and worries and ungodly heart- 
burnings are felt by him whose only weaponly 
possession is an ancient muzzle-loader, the barrels 
whereof halfway from breech to muzzle are worn 
bare of their first and only browning, with stock 
battered, scratched, and bruised, locks rickety and 
inviting irrigation. The rains may fall upon it 
and brambles scratch it, and it be none the worse 
for looks or use. Its owner may hang it on its hooks 
at night, with barrels foul and dully blushing 
with a film of rust; and sup with slow comfort, 
and then betake himself to dreamless sleep, un- 
troubled by thought of duty unperformed. 

What happy memories are awakened by the sight 
and touch of the old gun, with which one's first 
woodcock and snipe, wild duck and grouse were 
brought down. The very alder brake, and bog, 
river bend, and russet and green bit of beech and 
hemlock woodland rises before him, each the 
scene of a first glorious triumph in autumns long 
ago, and each in apparition almost as real as then, 
though all are changed or passed away. This bruise 
of the stock and dent in the barrel were got in a 
tumble over a ledge when you were rushing for a 



214 SMALL SHOT 

runway, and you remember how your heart tum- 
bled at the time, and it aches and burns yet with 
the fall it got, and the recollection of lost oppor- 
tunity. 

For use the old gun is as good as it was then — 
though its owner is not, and as for looks, he has 
none the better of it. Maybe there were those who 
used it before him, old hunters of the by-gone days 
when caplocks first came in and game was plenty; 
over whose tough old bones the grass has grown 
and withered, and the snow lain for many a year, 
and who are now remembered more by the guns 
they carried than by their gravestones. For the 
sights their now faded eyes beheld, for a chance at 
the game their guns brought down, what would one 
not give.^ The old gun is a link that holds one to 
the past. Let us not despise it, though it is of a 
fashion of other days — though it is rusted and 
battered and its maker's name worn off and for- 
gotten, it has that in it more enduring than iron, 
that which no new gun can have, no matter how 
handsome or good. 

III. THE SORROWS OF SPORTSMEN 

Even so happy a man as he who disports himself 
with rod and gun has his sorrows, as has the less 
favored mortal whose pleasure lies in walks out- 
side of quiet woods and afar from pleasant waters. 
Of the sportsman's vexations may be mentioned 



SMALL SHOT 215 

many pertaining to things inanimate and animate. 
Of the first class are kinking Hnes, ill- working reels, 
non-exploding caps and primers, sticking shells, 
un-sticking wads, and no end of such perverse 
belongings to the angler's and gunner's outfit, as 
well as those which come in his way, as twigs, logs, 
bogs, cold water under foot and pouring from over 
head, to switch, tangle, trip, bemire, and soak him. 
Of animate things, how will all the insects of the 
air and earth combine to torture him, and how will 
the very objects of his pursuit forsake all the laws 
and rules laid down by nature and custom, and 
thwart his skillfulest endeavors to possess them. 

But all these are nothing to the vexation and 
sorrow wrought unto his soul by his brother man. 
There are those counted honest in ordinary affairs 
of life who will poach in close times and rob their 
honester fellows of that which enriches not them 
and makes these others poor indeed — in the loss 
of time and satisfaction of reasonable desires. 
And there are also law-makers who put pig's heads 
on their shoulders when they come to making 
laws for the protection of fish and game, though 
they bear the levelest of brains when matters of 
valuation and taxation are concerned. 

Yet these are vexations of the spirit which one 
happy day of sport may lift, as north wind and 
sunshine the fog from the landscape. But when he, 
who has not been by his favorite stream since the 



216 SMALL SHOT 

year-ago summer when birds and fields welcomed 
him with song and holiday attire, now finds the 
banks laid bare by the axe, and the stream turned 
away by some scientific agriculturist who hates 
willows and crooked waterways; when he, who has 
not visited copse and wood with dog and gun since 
last year's leaves were gaudy or sere, goes out to- 
day to find the alders he had come to think his own, 
only brush heaps and clusters of stubby stumps; 
his worshiped hemlocks and pines, his lithe birches 
and widespread beeches, and bee-inviting dog- 
woods, only saw logs and piles of cord wood lying in 
state among lopped branches and fluffy plumes of 
fire-weed, his heart grows sick with a climbing 
sorrow that will not down. How suddenly has his 
goodly heritage passed from him. A year ago he 
had more good of it than the one who held the deed 
of the land, though he got naught tangible there- 
from but a half -filled creel or a few brace of birds. 
Yet how full was fed his starved spirit that so long 
had craved the blessed food that Nature gives to 
those who love her. 

The worst of it is, that if he prays, or curses, or 
weeps, he cannot change it. By and by over this 
waste may be heard the *' lovely laughter of the 
wind-swept wheat" and the hum of bees, which 
have come here to gather sweets from clover, but 
never again will brood over it the solemn quiet of 
the old woods, nor grouse cleave the shadows of 



SMALL SHOT 217 

great trees, nor woodcock thrid the mazes of the 
brake, nor trout swim in the shade of the willows. 
This is the heaviest grief that comes to the man 
who uses rod and gun, or to him who hunts with- 
out a gim. Yet some good may come of it, for 
thereby he may learn to pity his red brother, who 
loved all these things and suffered greater loss in 
their passing from his possession. 

IV. THE GOOSE-KILLERS 

The fable of the youth who killed the goose that 
laid every day a golden egg for him, has been told 
by tongue and print so often and for so many years 
that every one must have heard or read it, but it 
would seem that few had profited by it when year 
after year so many go on killing the geese that lay 
eggs of gold for them. It is no great matter of won- 
der that the thoughtless and purely selfish should 
do so foolish a thing, but it is almost past account- 
ing for that those who are forecasting and prudent 
in the general affairs of life should be so blind to 
their interest. 

When the wild geese come honking along the 
April sky, and wild ducks tarry a little on their 
journey in waters just unsealed, and snipe drop 
down on the thawing marshes to rest and feed, 
and flocks of shore birds skirt the long coast, all on 
their way to summer homes to lay eggs that would 
be golden in golden autumn, the goose-killer is in 



218 SMALL SHOT 

wait for them all along their thoroughfare at every 
halting place, greedy for the most, craving the last 
of them. Then when he has wrought what havoc 
he can, though not the half he would, and the 
frightened survivors of the harried flocks of mi- 
grants have gone their way to the savage but kinder 
far North, he amuses his bloodthirst awhile with 
spawning bass and trout fry too small to wear a 
visible spot, and boasts shamelessly of the num- 
bers he has caught. 

Presently the woodcock is hatched and able to 
fly and so is the young grouse, and the half -grown 
plover is making short flights across the fields where 
it was born, and the goose-killer is in his glory now, 
for he can smell powder and taste warm blood 
again. It matters little to him what the husbanded 
chances of the future might bring. He counts a 
tough morsel to-day better than a tender feast to- 
morrow. A lean waterfowl in spring, an untimely 
taken fish, a half-grown woodcock, or grouse or 
plover in summer time are more to him than the 
dozen or score of each that might be hatched from 
the golden egg, and might be taken by and by in 
their proper season — by some one else, perhaps. 
Aye, there's the rub that brings upon the world 
the calamity of the goose-killer's existence and 
evil deeds. He must have what he will to-day, lest 
some one get more to-morrow, though there be 
nothing left for any one to-morrow. 



k 



SMALL SHOT 219 

If there were no hounding of deer, the world 
might come to an end before he could boast of 
kiUing one, he, meanwhile, eating his own heart 
with bitter sauce of envy, beholding the skillful 
hunter kill his stag often by fair and sportsman- 
like methods. What is it to him that there should 
be no deer in all the woods twenty years hence, 
so that he to-day clubs to death one suckling 
doe? 

Nor is this so-called sportsman the only goose- 
killer whose wrongdoing makes us all suffer. For 
his and the milliners' profit and the barbarous 
ornamentation of women's head-dress, another 
ruthlessly slays the harmless and useful beautiful 
birds, to the world's loss of song and beauty and 
goodness. The farmer and the lumberman strip 
mountain and swamp of forest growth for a little 
present gain and the world's irreparable loss, the 
loss of copious springs and streams, and loss by 
disastrous floods. A few greedy speculators com- 
bine to spoil the nation's park for their own selfish 
gain, shameless, unscrupulous; and the nation 
looks on almost unconcerned, with but here and 
there a voice lifted in condemnation of the out- 
rageous scheme of destruction. 

So the ceaseless warfare against nature goes 
on, till one is almost ready to despair that the race 
of goose-killers shall be removed from the face of 
the earth till the last goose that lays an egg of 



220 SMALL SHOT 

gold shall be killed; that the destroyer shall pass 
away only when there is nothing left for him to 
destroy. 

V. WHY NOT WAIT ? 

We have come to the frayed end of another win- 
ter. The earth's white carpet is worn to shreds, 
and Nature is making ready to weave her a new 
one of green, with all sorts of flower patterns that 
ought not to "fail to please the most fastidious.** 
Some of the bluebirds have escaped the guns and 
snares of the milliners' collectors, and are with us 
again, the return of the robin has been announced, 
and the song sparrow is tuning up his pipe for the 
spring concerts. The crystal hatches will soon be 
off the streams, and the fishes will once more get a 
look at the sky, and at the angler, who is now be- 
ginning to overhaul his tackle in anticipation of 
the opening day of the season. 

The ducks and geese and snipe and shore-birds 
will presently be on their way to northern breed- 
ing-grounds, and too many sportsmen are making 
ready to give them a most inhospitable greeting as 
they pass or tarry for a few days of rest. Too many 
sportsmen will be ready with the old and poor 
excuse for this wrongdoing, "If I do not shoot 
them, some one else will," which is worth nothing, 
for it is not at all certain that some one else will 
kill the bird that you spare, and that it will not go 



SMALL SHOT 221 

safely to its breeding ground and return to pay 
tenfold interest in the fall for the lease of life you 
have given it. You would recoil with horror from 
the thought of killing a doe heavy with young, for 
you are an honorable and conscientious sports- 
man. And yet, all the females of these birds of 
passage are carrying eggs more or less developed, 
the hope of the abundant continuation of their 
species. And your example is worth something, as 
every man's is, yours perhaps worth far more than 
another's. K you did not get shooting in the spring, 
it is not unlikely that some one else would stay at 
home, simply because you did. 

Another excuse and a no better one is, " If we do 
not shoot ducks and geese and snipe in spring, we 
shall have no shooting till summer woodcock 
shooting comes," which ought not to come at all. 
Why not wait till autumn for sport worth having, 
and concerning which one need have no qualms of 
conscience? Is not sport, like love, "the sweeter 
for the trial and delay .^" 

Let the gun rest for a few months longer, and 
then when the steel blue skies of autumn endome 
the bluer waters and the varied hues of frost- 
painted woods and russet marshes, you shall reap 
your reward if it is no more than the consciousness 
of having faithfully done your duty. It is some- 
times nobler sportsmanship to spare than to kill. 
Assuredly it is so at this season. 



NEW ENGLAND FENCES 

A QUESTION of the future, that troubles the mind 
of the farmer more than almost any other is, 
What are we to do for fences? The wood-hungry 
iron horse is eating away the forests greedily and 
rapidly, and our people are ready to feed him to 
his fill for a paltry present fee, apparently learning 
no wisdom from the follies of our forest-destroy- 
ing ancestors, but carrying on the same old, sense- 
less, and indiscriminate warfare against trees 
wherever found, and seldom planting any except 
fruit-trees and a few shade-trees. 

And, alas ! no just retribution seems to overtake 
these evil-doers, except that most speculating de- 
foresters go to the bad pecuniarily, but the curse 
descends on the sorrowing lovers of trees, and will 
fall on our children and our children's children, — 
the curse of a withered and wasted land, of hills 
made barren, of dried-up springs and shrunken 
streams. 

It seems probable that a generation not far re- 
moved from this will see the last of the rail fences, 
those time-honored barriers of NewEngland fields, 
too generous of timber to be kept up in a land 
barren of forests. The board fence will endure 
longer, but will pass away at last, and after it. 



NEW ENGLAND FENCES 223 

what? Where stone walls are, they may continue 
to be, and where there are stones enough there may 
be more stone walls, but all New England is not so 
bountifully supplied in this respect as parts of it 
that I have heard of, where if one buys an acre 
of land, he must buy another to pile the stones of 
the first acre on. In some of our alluvial lands it is 
hard to find stones enough for the corner supports 
of rail fences. The hedge, except for ornamenta- 
tion in a small way, does not, somehow, seem to 
take kindly to us, or we to it; at least, I have never 
seen one of any great length, nor one flourishing 
much, that was intended to be a barrier against 
stock. If ever so thrifty for a while, is it not likely 
that the pestiferous field-mice, which are becoming 
plentier every year, as their enemies, the foxes, 
skunks, hawks, owls, and crows grow fewer, would 
destroy them in the first winter of deep snow? 
Great hopes were entertained of the wire fence at 
one time, but it has proved to be a delusion and 
indeed a snare. Some are temporizing with fate, 
or barely surrendering, by taking away the fences 
where grain fields or meadows border the highway. 
To me it is not pleasant to have the ancient boun- 
daries of the road removed, over which kindly- 
spared trees have so long stood guard, and along 
whose sides black-raspberry bushes have sprung 
up and looped their inverted festoons of wine- 
colored stems and green leaves with silver linings, 



224 NEW ENGLAND FENCES 

bearing racemes of fruit that the sauntering school- 
boy lingers to gather. And far from pleasant is it to 
drive cattle or sheep along such unfenced ways, 
which they are certain to stray from, and exhaust 
the breath and patience of him who drives them 
and endeavors to keep them within the unmarked 
bounds; moreover, it gives the country a common 
look in more than one sense, as if nothing were 
worth keeping in or out. It will be a sad day for 
the advertiser of patent nostrums, when the road 
fence of broad, brush-inviting boards ceases to 
exist, and if we did not know that his evil genius 
would be certain to devise some blazoning of his 
balms, liniments, and bitters, quite as odious as 
this, we should be almost ready to say, away with 
this temptation. That was a happy device of one 
of our farmers, who turned the tables on the im- 
pudent advertiser, by knocking the boards off 
and then nailing them on again with the letters 
facing the field. The cattle stared a Httle at first 
at Ridgeway*s Ready Restorative, but never took 
any. 

However, it is not my purpose to speculate con- 
cerning the fences of the future, nor to devise 
means for impounding the fields of posterity, but 
rather to make some record of such fences as we 
now have, and some that have already passed 
away. 

The old settlers, when they had brought a 



NEW ENGLAND FENCES 225 

patch of the earth face to face with the sun, and 
had sown their scanty seed therein, fenced it about 
with poles, a flimsy-looking barricade in the 
shadow of the lofty pahsade of ancient trees that 
walled the "betterments," but sufficient to keep 
the few wood-ranging cattle out of the field whose 
green of springing grain was dotted and blotched 
with blackened stumps and log-heaps. The pole 
fence was laid after the same fashion of a rail fence, 
only the poles were longer than rail-cuts. There 
were also cross-staked pole fences, in which the 
fence was laid straight, each pole being upheld by 
two stakes crossing the one beneath, their lower 
ends being driven into the ground. This and the 
brush fence, though the earliest of our fences, have 
not yet passed away. That the last has not, one 
may find to his sorrow, when, coming to its length- 
wise-laid abatis in the woodland, he attempts to 
cross it. If he achieve it with a whole skin and un- 
rent garments, he is a fortunate man, and if with 
an unruffled temper, he is certainly a good-natured 
one. According to an unwritten law, it is said that 
a lawful brush fence must be a rod wide, with no 
specification as to its height. You will think a less 
width enough, when you have made the passage of 
one. Coming to it, you are likely to start from its 
shelter a hare who has made his form there; or a 
ruffed grouse hurtles away from beside it, where 
she has been dusting her feathers in the powdery 



226 NEW ENGLAND FENCES 

remains of an old log; or you may catch glimpses 
of a brown wood wren silently exploring the maze 
of prostrate branches. These are the fence viewers 
of the woodlot. 

To build or pile a brush fence, such small trees 
as stand along its line are lopped down, but not 
severed from the stump, and made to fall length- 
wise of the fence; enough more trees are brought to 
it to give it the width and height required. Many 
of the lopped ones live and, their wounds healing, 
they grow to be vigorous trees, their fantastic 
forms marking the course of the old brush fence 
long after it has passed from the memory of man, 
I remember a noted one which stood by the road- 
side till an ambitious owner of a city lot bought it 
and had it removed to his urban patch, where it 
soon died. It was a lusty white oak, a foot or so 
in diameter at the ground, three feet above which 
the main trunk turned at a right angle and grew 
horizontally for about ten feet, and along this part 
were thrown up, at regular intervals, five perfect 
smaller trunks, each branching into a symmetrical 
head. It was the finest tree of such a strange 
growth that I ever saw, and if it had grown in a 
congenial human atmosphere, doubtless would 
have flourished for a hundred years or more, and 
likely enough, have become world-renowned. It 
was sold for five dollars ! No wonder it died ! 

The log fence was a structure of more substance 



NEW ENGLAND FENCES 227 

than either the pole or the brush fence, but be- 
longed to the same period of plentifulness, even 
cumbersomeness, of timber. The great logs, gen- 
erally pine, were laid straight, overlapping a little 
at the ends, on which were placed horizontally 
the short cross-pieces, which upheld the logs next 
above. These fences were usually built three logs 
high and formed a very solid wooden wall, but at a 
lavish expense of material, for one of the logs sawn 
into boards would have fenced several times the 
length of the three. I remember but one, or rather 
the remains of one, for it was only a reddish and 
gray line of mouldering logs when I first knew it, 
with here and there a sturdy trunk still bravely 
holding out against decay, gray with the weather 
beating of fifty years, and adorned with a coral- 
like moss bearing scarlet spores. 

From behind the log and brush fences, the prowl- 
ing Indian ambushed the backwoodsman as he 
tilled his field, or reconnoitered the lonely cabin 
before he fell upon its defenseless inmates. Through 
or over these old-time fences, the bear pushed or 
clambered to his feast of "corn in the milk" or 
perhaps to his death, if he blundered against a 
harmless-looking bark string and pulled the trigger 
of a spring-gun, whose heavy charge of ball and 
buck-shot put an end to his predatory career. 

After these early fences came the rail fence, as 
it is known in New England, or the snake fence. 



228 NEW ENGLAND FENCES 

as it is sometimes called from the slight resem- 
blance of its zig-zag line to the course of a serpent, 
or the Virginia fence, perhaps because the Old 
Dominion was the mother of it as of presidents, 
but more likely for no better reason than that the 
common deer is named the Virginia deer, or that 
no end of quadrupeds and birds and plants, having 
their home as much in the United States as in the 
British Provinces, bear the title of Canadensis. But 
rail, snake, or Virginia, at any rate it is truly 
American, and probably has enclosed and does yet 
enclose more acres of our land than any other fence. 
But one seldom sees nowadays a new rail fence, or 
rather a fence of new rails, and we shall never have 
another wise and kindly railsplitter to rule over us; 
and no more new pine rails, shining like gold in 
the sun, and spicing the air with their terebinthine 
perfume. The noble pine has become too rare 
and valuable to be put to such base use. One may 
catch the white gleam of a new ash rail, or short- 
lived bass-wood, among the gray of the original 
fence, a patch of new stuff in the old garment, 
but not often the sheen of a whole fence of such 
freshly riven material. Some one has called the 
rail fence ugly or hideous. Truly, it must be con- 
fessed, the newly laid rail fence is not a thing of 
beauty, any more than is any other new thing that 
is fashioned by man and intended to stand out of 
doors. The most tastefully modeled house looks 



NEW ENGLAND FENCES 229 

out of place in the landscape till it has gained the 
perfect fellowship of its natural surroundings, has 
steeped itself in sunshine and storm, and become 
saturated with nature, is weather-stained, and has 
flecks of moss and lichen on its shingles and its 
underpinning, and can stand not altogether shame- 
faced in the presence of the old trees and w^orld-old 
rocks and earth about it. So our fence must have 
settled to its place, its bottom rails have become 
almost one with the earth and all its others, its 
stakes and caps cemented together with mosses 
and enwrapped with vines, and so weather-beaten 
and crated with lichens that not a sliver can be 
taken from it and not be missed. Then is it beauti- 
ful, and looks as much a part of nature as the trees 
that shadow it, and the berry bushes and weeds 
that grow along it, and the stones that were pitched 
into its corners thirty years ago, to be gotten out 
of the way. Then the chipmunk takes the hollow 
rails for his house and stores his food therein, 
robins build their nests in the jutting corners and 
the wary crow is not afraid to light on it. What 
sheltering arms half enclose its angles, where storm- 
blown autumn leaves find their rest, and moulder 
to the dust of earth, covering the seeds of berries 
that the birds have dropped there — seeds which 
quicken and grow and border the fence with a 
thicket of berry bushes. Seeds of maples and birch 
and bass-wood, driven here by the winds of win- 



230 NEW ENGLAND FENCES 

ters long past, have lodged and sprouted, and have 
been kindly nursed till they have grown from 
tender shoots to storm-defying trees; there are 
clumps of sumacs also, with their fuzzy twigs and 
fern-like leaves and "bobs" of dusky crimson. 
Here violets bloom, and wind-flowers toss on their 
slender stems in the breath of May; and in sum- 
mer the pink spikes of the willow herb overtop 
the upper rails, and the mass of the goldenrod's 
bloom lies like a drift of gold along the edge of 
the field. 

The children who have not had a rail fence to 
play beside have been deprived of one abundant 
source of happiness, for every corner is a play- 
house, only needing a roof, which half a dozen 
bits of board will furnish, to complete it. Then 
they are so easy to climb and so pleasant to sit 
upon, when there is a flat top-rail; and when a 
bird's nest is found, it can be looked into so easily; 
and it is such jolly fun to chase a red squirrel 
and see him go tacking along the top rails; and 
there are such chances for berry-picking beside it. 
In winter, there are no snow-drifts so good to 
play on as those that form in regular waves along 
the rail fence, their crests running at right angles 
from the out-corners, their troughs from the inner 
ones. I am sorry for those children of the future 
who will have no rail fences to play about. 

The board fence is quite as ugly as the rail 



NEW ENGLAND FENCES 231 

fence when new, perhaps more so, for it is more 
prim and more glaring, as there is no alternation 
of light and shade in its straight line. But age im- 
proves its appearance also, and when the kindly 
touch of nature has been laid upon it, and has 
slanted a post here and warped a board there, and 
given it her weather-mark, and sealed it with her 
broad seal of gray-green and black lichens, by 
which time weeds and bushes have grown in its 
shelter, it is very picturesque. Its prevailing gray 
has a multitude of shades; the varied weather- 
stains of the wood, the lichens, the shags of moss 
and their shadows, and some touches of more 
decided color, as the yellowish-green mould that 
gathers on some of the boards, the brown knots and 
rust-streaks from nail-heads, patches of green 
moss on the tops of posts, and here and there the 
half — or less — of a circle, chafed by a swaying 
weed or branch to the color of the unstained wood. 
The woodpecker drills the decaying posts, and 
bluebird and wren make their nest in the hollow 
ones. There is often a ditch beside it, in which 
cowslips grow, and cat-tails and pussy-willows, 
akin only in name; on its edge horse-tails and wild 
grass, and higher up on the bank a tangle of hazel, 
wild mulberry, gooseberry and raspberry bushes, 
with a lesser undergrowth of ferns and poison ivy. 
The field and song sparrows hide their nests in 
its slope, and if the ditch is constantly and suffi- 



^2 NEW ENGLAND FENCES 

ciently supplied with water, sometimes the musk- 
rat burrows there, and you may see his clumsy 
tracks in the mud and the cleanly cut bits of the 
wild grass roots he has fed upon. Here, too, the 
hyla holds his earliest spring concerts. 

All this applies only to the plain, unpretend- 
ing fence, built simply for the division of fields, 
without any attempt at ornament. Nature has as 
slow and painful a labor to bring to her com- 
panionship the painted crib that encloses the 
skimpy dooryard of a staring, white, new — or 
modernized — farmhouse, as she has to subdue 
the glare of the house itself; but she will accom- 
plish it in her own good time, — the sooner if 
aided by a little wholesome unthrift of an owner 
who allows his paint-brushes to dry in their pots. 

The fence which is half wall and half board has 
a homely, rural look, as has the low wall topped 
with rails, resting on cross-stakes slanted athwart 
the wall, or the ends resting in rough mortises cut 
in posts that are built into the wall, which is as 
much of a "post and rail" fence as we often find 
in northern New England. A new fence of either 
kind is rarely seen nowadays in our part of the 
country, and both may be classed among those 
which are passing away. 

Of all fences, the most enduring and the most 
satisfying to the eye is the stone wall. If its 
foundation is well laid, it may last as long as the 



NEW ENGLAND FENCES 233 

world — which, indeed, it may slowly sink into; 
or the accumulating layers of earth may in years 
cover it; but it will still be a wall — a grassy ridge 
with a core of stone. A wall soon gets rid of its 
new look. It is not propped up on the earth, but 
has its foundations in it; mosses and lichens take 
quickly and kindly to it, and grass and weeds 
grow out of its lower crevices, mullein and brakes 
and the bulby stalks of goldenrod spring up beside 
it. Black-raspberry bushes loop along it, over it, 
and stretch out from it, clumps of sweet elders 
shade its sides, and their broad cymes of blossoms, 
and later, clusters of blackberries, beloved of 
robins and school-boys, bend over it. When the 
stones of which it is built are gathered from the 
fields, as they generally are, they are of infinite 
variety, brought from the Far North by glaciers, 
washed up by the waves of ancient seas, and 
tumbled down to the lower lands from the over- 
hanging ledges : lumps of gray granite and gneiss, 
and dull-red blocks of sandstone, fragments of 
blue limestone, and only a geologist knows how 
many others, mostly with smooth-worn sides 
and rounded corners and edges. All together, 
they make a line of beautifully variegated color 
and of light and shade. One old wall that I know 
of has been a rich mine for a brood of callow 
geologists, who have pecked it and overhauled it 
and looked and talked most wisely over its stones. 



234 NEW ENGLAND FENCES 

and called them names hard enough to break 
their stony hearts. 

At the building of the wall, what bending and 
straining of stalwart backs and muscles; what 
shouting to oxen — for it would seem the ox can be 
driven only by sheer strength of lungs; what rude 
engineering to span the rivulet; what roaring of 
blasts, when stones were too large to be moved in 
whole, and the boys had the noise and smoke and 
excitement of a Fourth-of-July celebration with- 
out a penny's expense, but alas! with no ginger- 
bread nor spruce beer. Then, too, what republics 
were convulsed when the great stones, under- 
neath which a multitude of ants had founded 
their commonwealth, were pried up, and what her- 
mits were disturbed when the newts were made to 
face the daylight, and earwigs and beetles forced to 
scurry away to new hiding-places ! But when the 
wall was fairly built, the commonwealths and her- 
mitages were reestablished beneath it, more se- 
cure and undisturbed than ever. 

The woodchuck takes the stone wall for his 
castle, and through its loopholes whistles defiance 
to the dogs who besiege him, but woe be to him if 
the boys join in the assault. They make a breach 
in his stronghold through which the dogs can 
reach him, or throw him a "slip-a-noose" into 
which he hooks his long teeth and is hauled forth 
to death. The weasel frequents a wall of this 



NEW ENGLAND FENCES 235 

kind, and there is hardly a fissure in its whole 
length through which his lithe, snake-like body 
cannot pass. You may now perhaps see his eyes 
peering out of a hole in the wall, so bright you 
might mistake them for dewdrops on a spider's 
web, or see him stealing to his lair with a field 
mouse in his mouth. In spring, summer, and fall, 
nature clothes this little hunter in russet, but in 
winter he has a furry coat almost as white as 
snow, with only a black tip to his tail by which to 
know himself in the wintry waste. The chipmunk, 
too, haunts the wall, and the red squirrel finds in 
it handy hiding-places into which to retreat, when 
from the topmost stone he has jeered and snickered 
at the passer-by beyond all patience. 

Long after our people had begun to tire of mow- 
ing and ploughing about the great pine stumps, 
whose pitchy roots nothing but fire would destroy, 
and when the land had become too valuable to 
be cumbered by them, some timely genius arose 
and invented the stump puller and the stump 
fence. This fence withstands the tooth of time as 
long as the red-cedar posts, of which the boy said 
he knew they would last a hundred years, for his 
father had tried 'em lots of times; and now many 
fields of our old pine-bearing lands are bounded 
by these stumps, like barricades of mighty antlers. 
These old roots have a hold on the past, for in 
their day they have spread themselves in the un- 



236 NEW ENGLAND FENCES 

sunned mould of the primeval forest, whereon no 
man trod but the wild Abenaki, nor any tamed 
thing; have had in turn for their owners swarthy 
sagamores, sceptered kings and rude backwoods- 
men. Would they had life enough left in them 
to tell their story! 

There is variety enough in the writhed and 
fantastic forms of the roots, but they are slow to 
don any covering of moss and lichens over their 
whity-gray, and so they have a bald, almost 
skeleton-like appearance. But when creeping 
plants — the woodbine, the wild grape, and the 
clematis — grow over the stump fence, it is very 
beautiful. The woodbine suits it best, and in 
summer converts it into a wall of dark green, in 
autumn into one of crimson, and in winter drapes 
it gracefully with its slender vines. 

This fence has plenty of nooks for berry bushes, 
milk-weeds, goldenrods, and asters to grow in, 
which they speedily do and, as a return, help to 
hide its nakedness. Nor does it lack tenants, for 
the robin builds on it, and the bluebird makes 
its nest in its hollow prongs, as the wrens used to, 
before they so unaccountably deserted us. The 
chipmunk finds snug cells in the stumps, wood- 
chucks and skunks burrow beneath it, and it 
harbors multitudes of field mice. 

In the neighborhood of sawmills, fencing a bit 
of the road and the sawy^er's garden patch, but 



NEW ENGLAND FENCES 237 

seldom elsewhere, is seen a fence made of slabs from 
the mill, one end of each slab resting on the 
ground, the other upheld by cross stakes. It is 
not an enduring fence, and always looks too new 
to be as picturesque in color as it is in form. The 
common name of this fence is quite suggestive of 
the perils that threaten whoever tries to clamber 
over it, and he who has tried it once will skirt it a 
furlong rather than try it again. The sawyer's 
melons and apples would be safe enough inside it 
if there were no boys, — but what fence is boy- 
proof.'^ 

Of all fences, none is so simple as the water 
fence, only a pole spanning the stream, perhaps 
fastened at the larger end by a stout link and 
staple to a great water-maple, ash or buttonwood- 
tree, a mooring to hold it from going adrift when 
the floods sweep down. If the stream is shallow, 
it has a central support, a big stone that happens 
to be in the right place, or lacking this, a pier 
made like a great bench; if deep, the middle of 
the pole sags into the water and the upper current 
ripples over it. On it the turtle basks; here the 
wood-duck sits and sleeps or preens his handsome 
feathers in the sun, and the kingfisher watches for 
his fare of minnows, and the lithe mink and the 
clumsy muskrat rest upon it. Neighbor's cattle 
bathe in and sip the common stream, and lazily 
fight their common enemies, the fly and the mos- 



238 NEW ENGLAND FENCES 

quito, and for all we know compare the merits of 
their owners and respective pastures. 

The fences of interval lands cannot be called 
water fences, although during spring and fall 
freshets they divide only wastes of water, across 
which they show merely as streaks of gray, or, as 
they are too apt to do, go drifting piecemeal down 
stream with the strong current. Then the owners 
go cruising over the flooded fields in quest of their 
rails and boards, finding some stranded on shores 
a long way from their proper place, some lodged 
in the lower branches and crotches of trees and in 
thickets of button-bushes, and some afloat, — 
losing many that go to the gain of some riparian 
freeholder further down the stream, but by the 
same chance getting perhaps as many as they 
lose. 

I have seen a very peculiar fence in the slate 
region of Vermont, made of slabs of slate, set in 
the earth like a continuous row of closely planted 
headstones. It might give a nervous person a 
shudder, as if the stones were waiting for him to 
lie down in their lee for the final, inevitable sleep, 
with nothing left to be done but the stone-cutter 
to come and lie on the other side the fence. 

The least of fences, excepting the toy fences 
that impound the make-believe herds of country 
children, are the little pickets of slivers that 
guard the melon and cucumber hills from the 



NEW ENGLAND FENCES 239 

claws of chanticleer and partlet. These are as 
certain signs of the sure establishment of spring as 
the cry of the upland plover. They maintain 
their post until early summer, when, if they have 
held their own against bugs, the vines have grown 
strong enough to take care of themselves and be- 
gin to wander, and the yellow blossoms meet the 
bumble-bee halfway. 

The "line fence," of whatever material, may 
generally be known by the trees left growing along 
it, living landmarks, safer to be trusted than 
stones and dead wood, and showing that, as little 
as our people value trees, they have more faith in 
them than in each other. The burning and fall of 
the "corner hemlock," on which was carved in 
1762 the numbers of four lots, brought dismay to 
four land-owners. The old corner has lost its 
mooring, and has drifted a rod or two away. 

What heart-burnings and contentions have 
there not been concerning line fences, feuds last- 
ing through generations, engendered by their 
divergence a few feet to the right or left, or by 
the question as to whom belonged the keeping up 
of this part or that ! When the heads of some rural 
households were at pitchforks' points, a son and 
daughter were like enough to fall into the old way, 
namely, love, and Juliet Brown steals forth in the 
moonhght to meet Romeo Jones, and they bill and 
coo across the parents' bone of contention, in the 



240 NEW ENGLAND FENCES 

shadow of the guardian trees. If I were to write the 
story of their love, it should turn at length into 
smooth courses, and have no sorrowful ending — 
no departure of the lover, nor pining away of the 
lass, but at last their bridal bells should say: 

"Life is sweeter, love is dearer. 
For the trial and delay "; 

and the two farms should become one, and nothing 
remain of the old fence but the trees where the 
lovers met, and under which their children and 
their children's children should play. 

The ways through and over our fences are few 
and simple. The bar- way (in Yankeeland "a pair 
of bars") seems to belong to the stone wall, rail 
and stump fences; though the balanced gate, with 
its long top bar pivoted on a post and loaded with 
a big stone at one end, the other dropping into a 
notch in the other post for a fastening, is often 
used to bar the roadways through them. The more 
pretending board fence has its more carefully 
made gate, swinging on iron hinges and fastened 
with a hook. Sometimes its posts are connected 
high overhead by a cross beam, — a "gallows 
gate," — past which one would think the mur- 
derer must steal with terror as he skulks along in 
the gloaming. 

The sound of letting down the bars is a familiar 
one to New England ears, and after the five or 



NEW ENGLAND FENCES 241 

six resonant wooden clangs, one listens to hear 
the cow-boy lift up his voice, or the farmer call his 
sheep. The rail fence is a stile all along its length, 
and so is a stone wall, though a stone or so is apt to 
tumble down if you clamber over it in an unaccus- 
tomed place. The footpath runs right over the 
rail fence, as easy to be seen in the polishing of the 
top rail as in the trodden sward. On some much- 
frequented ways "across lots" as to a spring, a 
slanted plank on either side the fence affords a 
comfortable passage, and down its pleasant in- 
cline a boy can no more walk than his marbles 
could. Let no one feel too proud to crawl through 
a stump fence, but be humbly thankful if he can 
find a hole that will give him passage. A bird can 
go over one very comfortably, and likewise over 
a brush fence, and this last nothing without wings 
can do ; man and every beast larger than a squirrel 
must wade through it, unless they have the luck 
to come to a pole-barway in it. 

A chapter might be written of fence breakers 
and leapers; of wickedly wise cows who unhook 
gates and toss off rails almost as handily as if they 
were human; of sheep who find holes that escape 
the eyes of their owners, and go through them with 
a flourish of trumpets like a victorious army that 
has breached the walls of a city; of horses who, in 
spite of pokes, take fences like trained steeple- 
chasers, and another chapter of fence walkers. 



242 NEW ENGLAND FENCES 

too, — for the rail fence and stone wall are con- 
venient highways for the squirrel whereon to 
pass from nut-tree and cornfield to storehouse 
and home, and for puss to pick her dainty way, 
dry-footed, to and from her mousing and bird- 
poaching in the fields; the coon walks there, and 
Reynard makes them a link in the chain of his 
subtle devices. 

One cannot help thinking of the possibility that, 
by and by, high farming may become universal, 
and soiling may become the common practice of 
farmers, and that then the building and keeping 
up of fences will end with the need of them, and 
the boundaries of farms be marked only by iron 
posts or stone pillars; then the old landmarks of 
gray fences, with their trees and shrubs and flower- 
ing weeds, will have passed away and no herds of 
kine or flocks of sheep dot the fields; and then, 
besides men and teams, there will be no living 
thing larger than a bird in the wide landscape. 
The prospect of such a time goes, with many 
other things, to reconcile one to the thought, that 
before that day his eyes will be closed in a sleep 
which such changed scenes will not trouble. 



HUNTING THE HONEY-BEE 

The honey-bee came to America with civilization, 
— probably with the Pilgrims. Such industrious 
and thrifty little people, withal so warlike upon 
occasion, and sometimes without, were likely to 
find favor with the pious fathers, who themselves 
possessed and valued these traits. After getting 
some foothold in their new home, they would have 
had a hive or two of real English bees brought 
over in some small tub of a ship, tossed and buffeted 
across the wintry seas. 

How the home feeling came back to the Puritan 
housewife when the little house of straw, built in 
England, was duly set on its bench, and in the first 
warm days of the early spring its inmates awoke to 
find themselves in a wild, strange land, and buzzed 
forth to experiment on the sap of the maple logs in 
the woodpile. How sweet to her homesick heart 
their familiar drowsy hum, and how sad the mem- 
ories they awakened of the fields of daisies and 
violets and blooming hedgerows in the loved Eng- 
land never to be seen again. 

There was rejoicing in the straw house when 
the willow catkins in the swamp and along the 
brooksides turned from silver to gold, and a happy 
bee must she have been who first found the ar- 



244 HUNTING THE HONEY-BEE 

butus in its hiding-place among the dead leaves, 
and the clusters of liverwort nodding above their 
purple-green leaves in the April wind, and the 
light drift of shad-blows that gleamed in the gray 
woods. Here were treasures worth forsaking even 
England to gather. Later she found the colum- 
bine, drooping over the ledge, heavy with sweets 
unattainable, and was fooled with the empty 
chalice of the bath-flower and with violets, blue as 
those of her own home, but scentless as spring- 
water. 

Catching the spirit of their masters, some of 
the bees set their light sails and ventured far into 
the great, mysterious forest, and, founding col- 
onies in hollow trees, began a life of independence. 
Their hoarded sweets became known to the bears 
and the Indians, no one knows how, or to which 
first. Perhaps the first swarm that flew wild 
hived itself inside a tree which was the winter 
home of a bear, who, climbing to his retreat when 
the first snows had powdered the green of the hem- 
locks and the russet floor of the woods, and back- 
ing down to his nest, found his way impeded by 
shelves of comb, filled with luscious sweetness the 
like of which no New England bear had ever be- 
fore tasted — something to make his paws more 
savory sucking through the long months. Then 
the Indian, tracing him to his lair, secured a 
double prize — a fat bear, and something sweeter 



HUNTING THE HONEY-BEE 245 

than maple sap or sugar. There is a tradition that 
an Indian wizard was feasted on bread and honey, 
and strong water sweetened with honey, by the 
wife of a Puritan magistrate, to the great satis- 
faction of the inner red man. Learning whence 
the lucent syrup came, he told the bees such tales 
of the flowers of the forest, blooming from the 
sunny days of mid-April till into the depth of 
winter (for he bethought him that the sapless 
yellow blossoms of his own witch-hazel would in 
some sort bear out his word), that all the yoimg 
swarms betook themselves to the wild woods and 
made their home therein. Another legend is that 
the wizard, in some way learning the secret of the 
bees, took on the semblance of their queen, and 
led a swarm into the woods, where he established 
it in a hollow tree, and so began the generation of 
wild bees. 

However it came about, swarms of bees now 
and then lapsed into the primitive ways of life 
that their remote ancestors held, and have con- 
tinued to do so down to these times, and will, 
when the freak takes them, utterly refuse to be 
charmed or terrified into abiding with their owners 
by any banging of pans or blowing of horns. 

No one knows who our first bee-hunter was, 
whether black bear, red Indian, or white hunter, 
but the bear or the Indian was likeliest to become 
such. Bruin's keen nose was his guide to the prize, 



246 HUNTING THE HONEY-BEE 

the Indian's sharp eyes and woodcraft his, and the 
white man improved on the primitive ways by the 
invention of the bee-box and the science of cross- 
lining. 

Bee-trees are sometimes found by accident, as 
when the bees, having been beguiled untimely 
forth by the warmth of the February or March 
sunbeams, are benumbed on exposure to the chill 
outer air and fall helpless and conspicuous on the 
snow at the tree's foot; or when in more genial 
days the in-going or out-coming of the busy in- 
mates betrays their home to some hunter of larger 
game, or searcher for a particular kind or fashion 
of a timber tree. Well do I remember how Uncle 
Key,^ veteran of our then last war, first master of 
our post-office, and most obliging of station- 
agents, discovered a great bee-tree on the side of 
the "New Road" ^ as it truly was then, and as it 
is and always will be called, I suppose, though its 
venerable projectors have long been laid to rest. 
Alert to profit by his discovery, Uncle Key called 
to his aid a couple of stout fellows, and with axes 
and vessels to hold a hundredweight or more of 
honey, he went to reap his reward. The tree was a 
monster; what an ocean of honey it might hold! 
There was no way in which it could be felled but 
right across the road, and there at last it lay, 

1 Uncle Key = Joshua Locke. 

2 New Road = Greenbush Road. 



HUNTING THE HONEY-BEE 247 

after much sweating of brows and lusty plying of 
axes — a barrier impassable to teams, athwart 
the commonwealth's highway, and nothing in it 
but a nest of yellow-jackets ! Another who suffered 
a like disappointment and a cruel stinging to boot, 
when asked, by one aware of the facts, "if he had 
got much honey," answered, as he rubbed open 
his swollen eyelids: "No, we didn't git much 
honey, but we broke up their cussed haunt." 
There was a degree of consolation in this. 

I do not like the bee-hunter as a bee-hunter, 
for he is a ruthless and lawless slayer of old trees. 
I cherish an abiding hatred of one who cut the 
last of the great buttonwoods on Sungahnee's 
bank. Think of his lopping down a tree whose 
broad leaves had dotted with shadow the passing 
canoes of Abenakis, in whose wide shade salmon 
swam and wild swans preened their snowy plum- 
age in the old days, — and for a paltry pailful of 
honey! I hope the price of his ill-gotten spoils 
burned his fingers and his pocket, and was spent 
to no purpose; that the honey he ate turned to 
acid in his maw and vexed his interior with gripes 
and colic; and I wish the bleaching bones of the 
murdered tree might arise nightly and confront 
him as a fearful ghost. Its roots were not in my 
soil, but its lordly branches grew in the free air 
which is as much mine as any man's, and when 
they were laid low I was done a grievous and ir- 



248 HUNTING THE HONEY-BEE 

reparable wrong. A good and thoughtful man has 
such a tender feeling for trees and the rights of 
other men that he will think twice before he cuts 
even a sapling for his real need. I abhor those 
murdering fellows who think no more of taking 
the life of a tree a century or two old than they 
would of killing a man. 

Nevertheless, I have good friends who are bee- 
hunters, chief among them one ^ who knows 
enough of Nature's secrets to make the reputation 
of two or three naturalists. The successful issue 
of a bee-hunt gives the toil a veritable sweetening, 
but I think my friend is successful even when un- 
successful, and that there is something sweeter to 
him in the quest than in the finding of a well-filled 
bee-tree. 

Our bee-hunter chooses August and September 
for his labor, or pastime, whichever it may be 
called, and he can hardly find a pleasanter day 
for it than one of those which August sometimes 
brings us in its later weeks — days that give us a 
foretaste of September's best, but are fuller of 
blossoms than they will be, though there are not 
enough flowers in the woods to keep the wild bees 
busy there. The sky is of purest blue, and across 
it a few clear-edged clouds, fleeces of silver and 
pearl, slowly drift before a fresh northerly breeze, 
and their swifter shadows drift across the ripening 

* Joe Birkett. 



HUNTING THE HONEY-BEE 249 

landscape — now darkening the green of meadow 
and pasture land, now the yellow of the stubble 
fields, and now flooding the light and shade of the 
woods with universal shadow. There is a whole- 
some coolness in the shade, and not too fervent 
warmth in the sunshine for one to bask comfortably 
therein if he will. 

The bee-hunter is burdened with but few im- 
plements in his chase: first of all, a "bee-box," 
six inches or so in length and a little less in width 
and height, with a hinged lid in which is set a 
small square of glass; midway between this and the 
bottom is a slide dividing the box into two com- 
partments, the lower one holding a piece of honey- 
comb partly filled when in use with a thin syrup of 
white sugar and water. There is also an axe, or, 
perhaps, no larger cutting tool than a jack-knife; 
sometimes a compass, and, if he be of a feeding 
turn of stomach, a dinner-pail. So equipped, he 
takes the field, seeking his small quarry along 
wood-side meadow fences, whose stakes and top 
rails alone show above a flowery tangle of golden- 
rod, asters, and willow herb; in pastures that 
border the woods, dotted with these and thorny 
clumps of bull-thistles and the dark-green sedge 
and wild grass of the swales, overtopped by the 
dull white blossoms of boneset, pierced by clustered 
purple spikes of vervain, and here and there 
ablaze with the fire of the cardinal-flower. 



250 HUNTING THE HONEY-BEE 

Carefully looking over the flowers as he goes 
slowly along, among the bumble-bees and wasps 
that are gathering from them their slender stores 
of present food his quick eye discovers a honey- 
bee alight on the upright tassel of a thistle, or 
sucking a medicated sweet from the bitter flower 
of the boneset, or stealing the fairy's draught from 
the little tankard of the wild balsam, or working a 
placer of goldenrod, or exploring a constellation 
of asters; and stealthily slipping the open box 
under her, he claps the cover down, and has her a 
fast prisoner. Now he darkens her cell by covering 
the glass with his hand till she has buzzed away 
her wrath and astonishment and settles on the bit 
of comb which, before catching her, the hunter 
had placed on the slide. Seeing through the little 
skylight that she is making the best of the situa- 
tion and is contentedly filhng herself with the 
plentiful fare provided, he sets the box on a 
stump, boulder, or fence (if either be at hand — if 
not, he drives a triple-forked stake, or piles a few 
"chunks" for the purpose), and, opening the lid, 
sits or stands at a Uttle distance, awaiting the out- 
coming of the bee. 

This takes place in five minutes or so, when, 
having freighted herself, she takes wing and rises a 
few feet, circles rapidly till she has her bearings, 
and then sails swiftly homeward. What compass 
does she carry in her little head to guide her so 



HUNTING THE HONEY-BEE 251 

truly? The hunter takes no great pains to get her 
course this first trip. He places the comb on the 
closed lid of the box, replenishes its cells from a 
vial of syrup, lights his pipe, and disposes himself 
comfortably to watch the return of his sometime 
captive. The length of time he has to wait for 
this depends partly on the distance the bee has to 
go and partly on the wealth of her swarm, the 
members of a swarm with a scanty store of honey 
working faster than those of a rich one. 

But soon or late she comes humming back, and, 
beating about a little, finds the lure and settles 
upon it, fills herself, rises, circles, and is away 
again. Now the hunter tries his best to catch her 
course, and it needs a quick and practiced eye to 
follow the brown speck as it gyrates wildly over- 
head for a moment and then darts away on the 
"bee-line," straight and swift as an arrow. Some- 
times he gets rid of the uncomfortable twisting of 
the neck which such rapid eye-following requires 
when sitting or standing, by lying on his back near 
the box. 

The bee has told her people of the easily gotten 
nectar, and, when next returning, brings a com- 
panion with her, and at each return perhaps an- 
other, till, maybe, a dozen are busy about the 
comb, and, as each flies homeward, the hunter 
strives to get its line of flight. Having this line 
pretty well established, if their journeys are evi- 



252 HUNTING THE HONEY-BEE 

dently short he follows it into the wood, and per- 
haps has the luck of finding the tree in a few min- 
utes. 

Our bee-hunter has no helpful bird, as the Afri- 
can bee-hunter has, to lead him by voice and flight 
to the hidden sweets, but must depend altogether 
on his own sharp eyes and skill. He takes little 
note of anything unconnected with his quest as he 
pushes through the brushwood and briers, and 
tramples the ferns under foot. The pack of half- 
grown grouse that go whirring away from his very 
feet may startle him with the suddenness of their 
uprising, but further than this he notices them as 
little as he does the jays that scold him or the 
squirrels that jeer at him, but holds right onward, 
his eye climbing every tree on the line that gives 
sign of hollow-heartedness, searching every foot 
of its length for the knot-hole, woodpecker's bor- 
ing, or crevice which may be the gate of the bee's 
castle. Finding this, he takes formal possession by 
right of discovery, and hoists his flag on the walls, 
or, to be more exact, carves his initials on the 
bark. 

If the bees are long in going and coming, he re- 
moves the comb to the bottom of the box, and, 
when some of the bees have settled on it, closes the 
lid. Then he jars the box till the bees rise to the 
top, when he shuts them off from the comb by 
closing the slide. This is to prevent them from 



HUNTING THE HONEY-BEE 253 

besmearing themselves with the syrup while being 
"moved up on the Hne/* which is now to be done. 

The hunter strikes into the woods at a smart 
pace, but carefully keeping his course and nurs- 
ing his box tenderly under his arm. So going for 
twenty, thirty, forty, or more rods, but not too far, 
in some convenient little opening or clearing, if he 
comes to it, he "sets up'* again and lets the bees 
on the comb, where they fill themselves and go and 
come as before. My bee-hunting friend tells me 
if the box has been unwittingly carried beyond 
their home, somehow the bees fail to find it again, 
as they do if it is set up very near the tree on the 
side it was approached. In the last case they prob- 
ably overfly it, but both failures seem strange in 
such wise little folk. 

"Cross-lining" is done by setting up at some 
little distance from the line already established, 
and getting a new one. Where this intersects the 
old, there, of course, the bee-tree is, but it is not 
the easiest thing in the world to find even then, for 
there may be a dozen trees about this not very 
well-defined point, each of which is likely enough, 
as looks go, to be the particular one. 

A couple of our bee-hunters had looked long 
for a tree on their line when one of them, backing 
up against a great basswood to rest, was stung 
midway between his head and his heels, that part 
of his person happening to block the entrance, so 



254 HUNTING THE HONEY-BEE 

low that it had been overlooked, to what proved to 
be an eighty-pound bee-tree. My particular bee- 
hunter was puzzled by a swarm this season which 
he found at last in a fallen tree, and so was saved 
the labor of much chopping. 

Like other mortals, the bee-hunter has his dis- 
appointments, as when the bees that he has lined 
through woods and across fields for a whole day, 
perhaps, or even longer, lead him at last to the 
sheltered hives of some farmhouse; or more than 
this, when, having found his tree and put his mark 
upon it, he goes at the first opportunity to cut it 
and finds that he has been forestalled by some 
freebooter, who has left him only the fallen tree, 
some fragments of empty comb, and the forlorn 
survivors of the harried swarm. 

When the stronghold of the bees is sapped by 
the hunter's axe and topples down, in many cases 
the garrison appears to be so overwhelmed by the 
calamity as to offer little or no resistance; but often 
the doughty little amazons fight so bravely for 
home and honey, that their assailants are obliged 
to smother them with a "smudge" of dead leaves 
or straw before they can secure their booty. 

The honey of the woods, though apt to be some- 
what dirty, from the manner in which it is ob- 
tained, is thought by many to be better than the 
honey of the hives. I never knew one who loved 
the woods much that did not find wild meat more 



HUNTING THE HONEY-BEE ^55 

toothsome than tame; and such may easily beHeve 
that this honey holds something of the aroma of 
the wild flowers from which it is so largely gathered 
and has caught a woodsy flavor from its wild sur- 
roundings. 



THE VOICES OP THE SEASONS 

One threatened with the loss of sight very nat- 
urally begins to reckon how far his other senses may 
be depended upon to acquaint him of what may 
be going on about him. If he is a lover of nature, 
a close or only an ordinary observer of it, he will be 
assured, as he recalls its voices, that if he were de- 
prived of all senses but that of hearing, this one 
sense would inform him of the presence of each 
season if it did not apprize him of its coming. 

The caw of returning crows, the swelling rush of 
unbound brooks, the nightly, monotonous, rasp- 
ing note of the Acadian owl, would tell him cer- 
tainly of the coming of spring. He would know by 
the crackling croak of the frogs, the hyla's shrill 
chime, the diffusive ringing of the toads, by the 
beat and roll of the ruffed grouse's mufl3ed drum, 
and by the querulous whistle of the woodchuck 
warmed to new vitality, that the soft breath of 
spring was filling the earth with life, that the squir- 
rel cups were blossoming in sunny woodside nooks, 
buds of arbutus beginning to blush under their 
rusty leaves on southern slopes of woodland ledges, 
and willow catkins were yellowing the swamps. 

In sweetest fashion of all, the birds would tell 
the story. Indeed, if he had ever noted their com- 



THE VOICES OF THE SEASONS 257 

ing, he might now almost name the day of the 
month when he heard the twitter of the first 
swallow, the flicker's heartening cackle, the jingle 
of the bobolink's song, the swell and fall of the 
plover's wail. 

The wind would stir the new leaves to tell him 
they were out, and the patter of the rain upon 
them would strengthen their testimony with a 
sound unmistakably different from its leaden pelt- 
ing of naked boughs and dead fields. The busy 
hum of bees overhead would tell of the blossoming 
of fruit trees, when the pendulous flowers of the 
locust were sweetest, and when, in July, the tiny 
bells of the basswood knoUed perfume to call all 
the bees to the woods. 

He would know when summer burned hottest by 
that very voice of heat, the shrill cry of the cicada, 
and by the troubled notes of parent birds, anx- 
iously watching the first adventures of their 
chirping young in a world rimmed by a wider 
horizon than the brink of the nest, and at night- 
fall, by the crickets, creaking in full chorus with 
earnest, tireless monotony. 

A little later would be heard the click of ripe 
apples through the leaves and their rebounding 
thuds upon the ground; at dusk, the screech owl 
shivering out his gruesome cry in the old orchard 
as if he "for all his feathers was a-cold" with the 
chill of the first autumnal evenings; and from 



258 THE VOICES OF THE SEASONS 

lonely woods would come the similarly quavering 
but more guttural, wilder and more lonesome call 
of the raccoon. 

The absence of the earlier migrants would as 
noticeably mark the season as the hail and fare- 
well of others passing southward in the night- 
time; the startled chuckle of the plover, with 
hardly a hint in it of his springtime wail; the 
scaipe of the snipe; the woodcock's whistle; the 
bittern's squawk, voicing all his ungainliness; the 
quick, sibilant beat of wild ducks' wings; and the 
note of many a winged traveler whose identity can 
only be guessed at. One may know when October 
days have come by the gentle alighting of falling 
leaves, the incessant nut-rasping of the squirrels, 
the busy stir and low, absorbed notes of the jays 
in the beeches, the irregular patter of dropping 
mast, the chipmunk's clucking good-bye to the 
outer world, and an occasional clamor suddenly 
uprising from a great army of crows on its winged 
retreat to more hospitable climes. 

Too soon one hears the scurry of wind-blown 
leaves along the earth and the clash of naked 
branches, the purr of the first snow falling on 
frozen grass and dry leaves and its light beat on 
roof and pane. The latest migrating wild geese 
announce their passage with a musical confusion 
of clarion notes, and jays, hairy and downy wood- 
peckers, nuthatches and chickadees come from 



THE VOICES OF THE SEASONS 259 

the woods and abide near the habitations of men, 
each with well-known note making one aware of 
his presence. With the snow come great flocks of 
snow buntings, late familiars of the Esquimau and 
Lap, the white bear and the reindeer, and all the 
animate and inanimate savagery of the frozen 
north. Their creaking twitter reminds one of 
the creak and tinkle of moving ice, their voice a 
voice of winter, unmistakable though faint. 

There are winter days, or hours in winter days, 
when one's ears might make him believe that night 
was brooding over the earth, so hushed are all 
the voices of nature in a silence deeper than per- 
vades even any night of spring, summer, or fall, for 
the silence of such a night will now and then be 
broken by insect, reptile, or nocturnal bird, or 
nightly prowling beast, or be emphasized by the 
low murmur of a distant stream. But now, not a 
bird note nor stir of withered leaf, nor smothered 
plaint of ice-bound brook, no sound of anything, 
animate or inanimate, disturbs the deathlike 
quietude which as unequivocally if not as im- 
periously, as his voices, proclaim the absolute 
sovereignty of winter. The sullen roar of the 
winds in leafless woods, the hiss of driving snow, 
the crack and shiver of ice may be heard in early 
spring and late fall, but this dead stillness is a sole 
prerogative of the stern king's reign. 

When an unseasonable rain falls on the snow, 



260 THE VOICES OF THE SEASONS 

freezing as it falls, there is presently a hollow rattle 
of drops on the new-made crust, and every ice- 
sheathed branch and twig creaks and tinkles in 
the wind till the trees drop showers of gems that 
you can almost hear the glitter of. Sometimes 
when one sets foot on such a crust it seems as if 
the whole surface of a great field sank slightly, with 
a sudden resentful crash at the crunch of the first 
footfall. One's first impression is that he has 
sprung some immense natural trap, and he holds 
his breath for an instant in dazed expectation of 
catastrophe. Another characteristic sound of 
winter is the settling of "shell ice," when after a 
great thaw and flood, followed by sudden cold 
weather, the new ice falls to the level of the sub- 
siding waters. It drops with startling suddenness, 
but with a prolonged musical ring very different 
from the short, flat crack of snow crust, while 
splinters of the broken edges slide down the sloped 
border and far across the lowered level, jingling 
and clinking as they glide like scattered handfuls 
of silver coin. 

In the neighborhood of great frozen lakes is often 
heard one of the wildest sounds of winter and the 
most unearthly, the booming of the ice, caused by 
its cracking or by its contracting and expanding, 
or, as some maintain, by air beneath it. At first a 
thin, tortured cry arises, faint and far away, 
growing louder in swift approach, rising at times 



THE VOICES OF THE SEASONS 261 

almost to a yell, and mingled with hollow groans, 
now suddenly ceasing for an instant, now as sud- 
denly bursting forth, then falling and dying away 
in such a wail as it began, far off in the direction 
opposite to that from whence it arose. It is as if 
tormented spirits were fleeing through the air, 
fleeter than the wind, as invisible, with voices as 
pervasive. 

The sharp, clear, resonant crack of trees under 
stress of severest cold, like the breaking of an 
over-strained cord, and the duller snapping of 
house timbers, tell of still starlit nights, when the 
whiskers of the wandering fox are silvered with 
his breath. In such nights the great horned owl 
hoots a prophecy of storm. Its fulfillment is 
heard in a gusty south wind driving a pelting slant 
of rain against weatherboards and windows and 
upon the snow till the rush of free brooks falls 
upon the ear once more. 

The outlawed crow proclaims his return to such 
scant forage as the bare fields may yield. The 
great owl's least cousin sharpens his invisible saw 
in the softer-breathing evenings. Some morning 
the first robin pipes his greeting, then from high 
overhead floats down the heavenly carol of the 
bluebird, the song sparrow sings blithely again 
and phoebe calls, and we know, though we only 
hear of it from them, that spring is here once more. 

THE END 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



